Susan Johnston, who let me visit her home in Dover, Delaware, which is where the famed astronomer Annie Jump Cannon was raised. (The house is actually owned by Wesley College and is the school’s president’s home; Susan’s husband is Dr. William Johnston, president of Wesley.) Cannon used to go on the roof when she was a little girl and gaze at the stars. Later, while working at the Harvard Observatory, Cannon discovered 300 variable stars and, in the early 1900s, came up with the stellar classification system that is used to this day to categorize all stars. She became the first woman to
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