The Legacy of Annie Jump Cannon: Discoveries and Catalogues of Variable Stars (Abstract)

Volume 40 number 1 (2012)

Barbara L. Welther

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, 295 Salem Street, Unit 54, Woburn, MA 01801; barbara.welther@gmail.com

Abstract

(Abstract only) This paper will review the many variable star projects and publications that Annie Jump Cannon brought to fruition in her forty-five-year career at Harvard College Observatory. In 1896, when Cannon joined the “Corps of Women Computers” at HCO, Williamina Fleming already enjoyed world-wide acclaim for her discoveries of novae on photographs of stellar spectra. Antonia Maury had also become renowned: she had discovered and analyzed a rare spectroscopic binary star, b Aurigae. At that time, such discoveries made headlines in newspapers, especially because they were made by women who studied astronomy by day! When Cannon was not actively involved in classifying stellar spectra, she took up HCO’s project of cataloguing observations of variables. As a result, she discovered thousands of long period variable stars and half a dozen novae in the Milky Way. In 1903 she published “A Provisional Catalogue of Variable Stars” in Harvard Annals 48. Subsequently, Margaret Walton Mayall and Florence Campbell Bibber continued cataloguing the variables through 1941, when Cannon died. In 1918, when Cannon and others such as Edward Pickering and Solon Bailey, were made honorary members of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, Cannon wrote: “I assure you it is a pleasure to be associated in this way, with a company of ardent observers and investigators, whose results are of so much value and carried on with such enthusiasm. It well be a spur to me in my future work, especially as to the new Catalogue of Variable Stars, which I hope to finish before very long.”