Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Delaware: Census Taker of the Sky with Quigley Goode

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

Sharon is joined by Quigley and Alex Goode, professional content creators and founders of Soulcial Media, to learn about a legend in astronomy, Annie Jump Cannon. Born on the eve of the women’s suffrage movement, Annie Jump Cannon was an American astronomer and pioneer of star classification who acquired a college education and made a career for herself in a society that discouraged both of which. Known as the “Census Taker of the Sky,” Annie is most well-known for developing a star cataloging and classification system that astronomers still use today, known as the Harvard spectral classification system. Born and raised in Delaware, today Annie is considered Delaware’s contribution to American innovation, she has been inducted into the Royal Astronomical Society, and the asteroid 1120 Cannonia is named in her honor. Annie Jump Cannon is an example of what can happen when your gifts and passions align. For more information on this episode including all resources and links discussed go to https://www.sharonmcmahon.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. What do Ontario dairy farmers bring to the table? A million little things. But most of all, the passion and care that goes into producing the local, high-quality milk we all love and enjoy every day. With 3,200 dairy farming families across Ontario sharing our love for milk, there's love in every glass.

Dairy Farmers of Ontario, from our families to your table, everybody milk. Visit milk.org to learn more. Hey friends, delighted you can be here. Delighted you can be here to hear my conversation with Quigley and Alex Goody. You might know them from the Instagram account Officially Quigley, and I have an incredible story for you today. It is about a woman from Delaware who has changed the science of astronomy. Changed it. Probably don't know her name because of the way science was at the time that she lived, but that is ending today. because of the way science was at the time that she lived. But that is ending today. After today, you're going to know her name. So let's dive into this conversation with Quigley and Alex Goody.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Thank you guys so much for coming. I'm here today with the Quigley and Alex Goody. coming. I'm here today with the Quigley and Alex Goody. Tell everybody what you guys do. So we are essentially professional content creators, which means we make video, photo, all sorts of documentation of our actual lives and share it on social media. Yeah, I guess I would add to that. I'm a professional Instagram husband, shall we say. It's a special designation these days. It is. It is. I went to many years of schooling. I'm very happy to be here and to be my very accomplished wife's sidekick. We run a lifestyle blog, if you will, that documents our weird little

family that has now grown by one. We had our first son back in September. In addition, we also own an educational platform called Soul Chol Media, S-O-U-L, C-I-A-L Media, which is basically aimed at educating people on how to use social media for business, whether you're a small business or a creator, an artist, or an individual. Social media is a very free entity through which businesses can grow. I love that because I know small businesses, especially brick and mortar businesses that are really hesitant to jump into social media because they only see the negative aspects of it. When in reality, it's a tool, just like a hammer can build a house. It can also break a window. Social media is a tool and it's a free tool. Free, free, free. One of the things that I love about social media is that I have found all my peoples.

Whereas where were those people living in my city? I don't know. Do you live near me? I don't know. How would I know you're my person? Do you know what I mean? Whereas on social media, you can find your people. It feels amazing to be in a community with people who think similarly, believe similar

things, have similar interests to you. Your impact has been so huge from fundraisers that you've done to just all of your educational resources. You're changing the world and I love you for it. Thank you. That's so nice. Well, I have some education for you today. Some edutainment. Do either of you know who Amy Jump Cannon is? No, but that's an amazing name. Wait, she jumped the Grand Canyon? No, Alex, this is not a tall tale, okay? She's not the wife of Paul Bunyan. Oh, shoot.

Wasn't his wife an ox? That's not how the story goes, never mind. Okay, Annie Jump Cannon was born in 1863 in Delaware. Her dad was a shipbuilder and a state senator, and so she came from a family that was well off. Her mother was obviously also a very bright woman because her mother taught her about astronomy and about identifying constellations and really fostered her interest in astronomy when she was a young girl. And when she got to be old enough to be done with schooling, she was encouraged to go to college. She went to Wellesley. She graduated with

a degree in physics and was the valedictorian. Astronomy is like one of the hardest courses you can take. I took it in college. It was very difficult. Case in point. I took astronomy in college too. My intro to astronomy class was really just kind of learning some basics, but in order to really understand astronomy, you have to be super good at physics. To me, that was like, and that's where I'm out. So Wellesley is one of the seven sisters colleges started in the United States in the Northeast that were women's universities. They were very exclusive. You had to be very bright.

And the Seven Sisters Colleges were Mount Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Barnard. Radcliffe is one of them. And Radcliffe was the women's college of Harvard. And so Radcliffe and Harvard have now merged because women can go to Harvard now. Great. So just FYI. Yes. So she graduates from Wellesley, then decides, what am I going to do with this degree in physics? I don't know. So she decides she's going to pursue her hobby of photography and she travels to Europe with her big box camera. She became very proficient at photography. Again,

this is in like the 1880s, 1890s at a time when women would not just travel to Europe and be photographers. It's not 2021 where every woman is a photographer in Europe. This is going toward the reveal that she is truly the first millennial. You're not far off. She has a lot of perspectives that millennials would relate to. Absolutely. She was a very big advocate. This is an aside, but she's a very big advocate of women's suffrage, women's rights. She was active in the women's political parties to try to get the 19th Amendment passed, get women the right to vote. So she explored her passions. She advocated for what she believed in. She was multi-passionate, you know, like had many different interests.

A lot of things in common with millennials. I don't want to be friends with Annie. So after she gets home from Europe, she, at some point, becomes very, very ill with scarlet fever and loses almost all of her hearing. And so she essentially has to go through life as a nearly deaf person. So it became very difficult for her to socialize with other people, difficult to have conversations. So although she had the advantage in that she had previously been a hearing person, so she knew how to speak. In 1894, her mom died and she's just really kind of adrift. What am I going to do? I'm newly hard of hearing. My mom has died. My mom was really the person who

encouraged my passions. And so she decided to write a letter to her old physics professor at Wellesley to see, would there be like a job for me there? Is there something I could do there? I don't know what to do with my life. And her professor at Wellesley said, yes, come be a physics instructor at Wellesley. That would be fantastic. So she goes to Wellesley. She's like a junior physics instructor. And because she's teaching at the school that allowed her to enroll in graduate courses in physics, she becomes fascinated by the science and the study of spectroscopy. It is the study of the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation as a function of the wavelength or frequency of the radiation. Easy. Oh, that makes sense then. In simpler terms,

spectroscopy is the precise study of the color of the visible light spectrum, which we all know that, like prisms, where it separates into the different light colors. You know what I'm talking about? So she's teaching at Wellesley. She's studying at Wellesley. And she realizes, because I'm interested in this science, I need access to a better telescope than they have here at Wellesley. Where is the best telescope in America? And it was at Harvard. So her only way to access the Harvard telescope was to enroll as a special student at Radcliffe. The way that it worked, of course, because women and men could not be educated together. That would be ridiculous. The Harvard professors would deliver their lectures

to the Harvard male students who were deserving of their time and attention, and then they would go over to Radcliffe and they would deliver the lecture a second time to the female students because you could not possibly do it at one time. It's important to note that the Harvard College Observatory is extraordinarily important in the study of astronomy. They have developed classification systems and the impact of the Harvard Observatory on the science of astronomy is very great. So that's, of course, where she wanted to be because she saw the potential there. Eventually, after studying there for a short period of time, the director of the observatory, whose last name was Pickering, saw her potential, saw how bright she was, saw how good she was at

physics, and hired her to be one of what was known at the time as one of Pickering's harem. What? Yeah. So Pickering being the director of the observatory, he hired her to be part of his harem. Were there other females in it? Yes, there were other females. And it wasn't a real harem. It was actually a very important scientific job. But again, we couldn't call women scientists. And we would definitely only pay them 25 cents an hour. Oh my god. That's definitely how we would have done that. The more official, more socially acceptable name that they use today is the Harvard Computers. And they were actually a group of women from Radcliffe College hired by

Pickering to work on this new project called the Henry Draper Catalog. And the purpose of this catalog, which was funded by a bequest from this wealthy man who was an astronomer and a photographer, the purpose of the catalog was to map and catalog every star in the sky. Interior Chinatown is an all-new series based on the best-selling novel by Charles Yu about a struggling Asian actor who gets a bigger part than he expected when he witnesses a crime in Chinatown. Streaming November 19th only on Disney+. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends and together we have the podcast Office Ladies where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for

brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. She gets hired to do this job. And one of the things that they were trying to do in addition to mapping all the stars was cataloging them into the type of star that they were.

cataloging them into the type of star that they were. And the way that they figured out what the type of star was by using a system of classification that Annie developed, classification system that is still used today. It's based on the spectral pattern of the star itself and the color of the light that the star emits. Oh my God. She was the first person to discover the sun. Maybe not quite, but here's how it worked. The men of course got the jobs where they got to operate the telescopes and men took pictures using this prism technology that

they had developed. And then the women, the Harvard computers, analyzed the data and they carried out the calculations to determine the classification of the star. The classification is based on what are referred to now as Balmer absorption lines. Johann Balmer, I'm not going to make you memorize this, but he was a Swiss atomic physicist. He developed the formula to classify the light spectrum based on hydrogen atoms. He is the pioneer of the formula about how we can classify light into the various visible light spectrums. I'm not going to pretend I know how the formula works because I definitely do not. But I find it fascinating that somebody else in the 1800s was like, you know, what we really need to do is classify a hydrogen atom. Like how, how do we do? I have no idea. There are scientists who

could tell you, I just find it fascinating that this is even a thing, right? Right. In the 1800s. So astronomy students today still use this classification system using a mnemonic device, which is, oh, be a fine girl, kiss me. So it's like O-B-A-F-G-K-M. That is how they classified stars based on the color and like what type of star they were. How did they come up with that? That's the pickup line I used to get my wife. That's right. Oh, be a fine girl. Kiss me. Worked on her. So here's the thing. She got so good at doing this kind of work that the director of the observatory said she was literally the best in the world at it. Wow. And I really think her interest in photography, the fact that she was experiencing deafness, perhaps maybe allowed her other senses to kind of pick up the slack of her

missing hearing. She was able to identify the type of stars by looking at them in ways that no other human on earth could. Wow. And this is what the historic record says about her work. When she first started cataloging the stars, she was able to classify a thousand stars in three years. But by 1913, after having been doing this for a while, she was able to work on 200 stars an hour and was able to classify three stars a minute just by looking at their spectral patterns. If she was using a magnifying glass, she could classify them to like an extraordinary

degree of visual acuity, what they call the ninth magnitude, which is 16 times fainter than human eyesight. Over her lifetime, Annie Cannon classified more than 350,000 stars, and she discovered 300 stars. Wow. Isn't that insane? I can't even fathom. No. Number. No. So she became the first woman in the world to ever receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford for her contributions to astronomy.

She eventually traveled to Peru for six months to photograph the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. Her work is what allowed astronomers to understand that stars are made up primarily of helium and hydrogen. She was instrumental in figuring out the formula to calculate how far away from Earth a star is. What? Which to me, I still don't, I don't get it. I like it, but I don't get it. How do we do that? How do we do that in like 1900? How are we calculating how far away a star is? How? But I love it. Of course, some of the byproducts of being born a woman during this time is that your boss gets all the glory.

Her boss Pickering has craters on the moon and Mars named after him. The classification system that she developed didn't get to be known as the Canon classification system. It's the Harvard classification system. So she didn't get to go down in fame and glory in the same way that male scientists would have, had they had the kind of accomplishments that she did. But she did accomplish a few things. So I'm going to give you like a little rundown of just a couple things that she achieved. I already mentioned that she was the first woman in the world to ever get an honorary doctorate from Oxford. In 1929, the League of Women Voters chose her as the greatest living American woman, which to me, that is like, dang, okay. Okay. She has honorary degrees from a bunch of colleges.

There is an asteroid named after her that came later. She was nicknamed the census taker of the sky. There are astronomy awards that are still given out that are named after her. There is a dorm at the University of Delaware named after her, Cannon Hall. She was named also the curator of astronomical photographs at Harvard and inducted into like the Royal Astronomical Society in Europe. I mean, I could go on and on about all of the types of honors that she received, which of course were, they're extraordinary for any human, but especially extraordinary given the time period, given that women didn't have the right to vote. She has also been depicted on a special Delaware coin in 2019, Delaware's contribution to American innovation. So here's just a couple of little interesting things.

She died in 1941, but of course, as a pioneer of astronomical classification, she would have worked on the constellation Pleiades, which is one of the closest constellations to earth and is depicted in almost every civilization. You know, almost every Native American tribe has legends about the Pleiades all over Europe, Asia, India, Hawaiian islands. They all have myths about the origin of the Pleiades. The Pleiades are mentioned in the Bible a number of times. For example, in the book of Job, God asks Job, can you bind the chains of Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? Basically saying like, you can't, but I can. So Pleiades, very close, bright stars.

The Aztecs based their calendar year on the Pleiades. That's how well known this constellation is, right? I know it well. Do you? It is on my back. The Pleiades is on your back? I have a birthmark of Pleiades on my back. Not a tattoo, a birthmark.

Seven little freckles in the shape of Pleiades. That is amazing. Halloween, by the way, is based on the ancient Celtic festival, corresponded many thousands of years ago with the ascent of the Pleiades in the night sky. And we now have, based on tradition, just said October 31st. Most people can't see the seven stars of the Pleiades. Most people can only see six. And you have to have like really great eyesight to be able to see seven stars of the Pleiades. There's a hypothesis that they used to be able to see seven stars,

like back before light pollution wrecked it. You know what I mean? And now it's like too hard to see with the naked eye. But I found this very interesting. What are the Pleiades? They're the seven sisters. The college that she attended was part of the seven sisters. How would you know, right? That like on this podcast today, we'd be talking about a constellation you have on your back, that she was going to go to the college that aligned with this constellation that she was going to go to the college that aligned with this

constellation that she later helped to identify. And the other thing that I find super interesting about the Pleiades, which is pervasive in American culture today, is that the logo is the Pleiades. Yes. Yes. Yes. You don't drive a Subaru. I bet you feel real dumb right now. Honestly, I've always looked at the Subaru logo and wondered what that was. It's stylized. Yes. Yep. And the name, the name, you know, like they, the name Subaru means come together. The car company was formed by five different businesses that joined together to make this car company. And that was why they decided on the name Subaru, why they use the Pleiades as their logo. Boom.

There's your full circle moment. Subaru Car Millennials. That is so cool. It's actually funny when you said that the women's colleges were the seven sisters. I was like, is that anything to do with Pleiades? Some of them were seven girls playing on top of a hill and they were running so fast that they ascended into the night sky. You know, like there's a variety of explanations for this constellation. I love it. What a fantastic woman. She sounds so cool. I would love to be her friend. Well, she sounds like a wonderful lady. Isn't that amazing? Is she never married? Never had any children? Who'd have time? Accomplish all of this while being deaf.

I think what's cool about it is that she defied society's limitations on her. Absolutely. My takeaway is look what you can accomplish when you don't have kids. But look at what you can accomplish when your gifts and your passions align, right? She was obviously super gifted in this area. She was gifted with the ability to make sense of this kind of stuff. I don't have those gifts. I got different gifts, but not those. File that name away for a future baby name use. If you ever have a daughter, you can name her Annie Jump Cannon Goody. Okay. Tell everybody where they can find you.

Oh, on Instagram is where we primarily reside. That's where we live. I'm at Officially Quigley and... Oh, I'm at Jack Poticorn. We also have the social media where you can find all of our educational resources for small businesses and content creators and artists. Yay. Thank you guys

so much for joining me. This was perfect. I loved having this conversation with you. Thanks. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review, or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind-blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.