Skywatch for the week of May 10, 2021
Mon May 10, 2021 ANNIE CANNON’S OBAFGKM 99 years ago, on May 9th, 1922, astronomers formally adopted Annie Jump Cannon’s stellar classification system. Annie Cannon worked at the Harvard Observatory, where she sorted and catalogued stars by their spectra. When you look at the light of a star through a specialized prism, a spectroscope, you can see that within the rainbow spectrum of the star’s light there are thin gaps where the color is missing. These gaps result when the outer atmospheres of those stars absorb the light, and the spacing of the gaps can be matched up with similar lines...
Source: wqcs.org
