Poesie Perfume Miss Behave General Catalog Perfume Oil (Available)
Notes: cool night air, star anise + nutmeg, twinkling golden resins, a milky swath of vanilla stars
“In our troubled days it is good to have something outside our planet, something fine and distant for comfort.” — Annie Jump Cannon
Annie Jump Cannon observed her first stars from the roof of her childhood home in Delaware with her mother, where they used an old astronomy textbook to identify what they saw. With her interest in science encouraged from childhood, Cannon received college degrees in physics and astronomy in 1884, graduating as class valedictorian. When she began her career a decade later, after the death of her mother in 1894, she eventually joined a group of women “computers” at the Harvard Observatory, where she quickly rose from assistant to recognized astronomer in her own right.
While at the Harvard Observatory, Cannon created the modern star classification system which categorizes stars based on temperature and color. Her system is still in use today, over a hundred years later. Cannon also classified almost 350,000 stars manually, more than anyone else has done in a lifetime. By the end of her career, she had so many honorary degrees that listing them here would be absurd. But her work wasn’t without its critics. Some people thought she and her female colleagues should stay home where they belonged. (Did someone say absurd?)
You might find it interesting to know that in addition to being a female scientist at the turn of the century, Cannon was also legally deaf. She read lips. She read the future of women in STEM. And she read the stars.
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