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Annie Jump Cannon was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures.
The daughter of shipbuilder and state senator Wilson Lee Cannon and his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Jump, Cannon grew up in Dover, Delaware. Cannon's mother had a childhood interest in star-gazing, and she passed that interest along to her daughter. Cannon had four older step-siblings from her father's first marriage, as well as two brothers, Robert and Wilson. Cannon never married but was happy to be an aunt to her brother's children.
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