Fleming, Maury, Cannon, and the Classification of Stars

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The systematic classification of photographic stellar spectra at Harvard began in 1886 when the widow of Henry Draper provided funds for this purpose. As Secchi1s visual system was too crude, Pickering with the help of Mrs. Williamina Fleming devised a new system. They arranged the spectra in order of increasing complexity, naming them types A through M and adding N through Q for less frequent spectra that did not fit into the primary sequence. For the first Draper Catalogue (1890) Fleming classified 10,495 stars. Subsequently, when higher dispersion spectra became available, Antonia Maury was employed to classify bright northern stars, and Annie J. Cannon the southern. Cannon dutifully adopted the Pickering-Fleming system, whereas Maury meticulously devised a system of her own, on the basis of which she ascertained that Pickering-Fleming classes O and B should precede, not follow, A. Pickering and Cannon acquiesced and Cannon then introduced the decimal subdivisions between the Pickering-Fleming standards. The nine volume HD Catalogue (1918-24) includes 225,300 stars. Extensions, for fields for which other astronomers needed classifications for fainter stars, brought Cannon1s total to 359,083 stars. To date, MK classes are still lacking for nearly half of these.

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