Trending on social media and featured on the search engine's iconic Google Doodle, Annie Jump Cannon, a pioneering female astronomer, would have celebrated her 151st birthday on Thursday, Dec. 11.

Cannon is recognized universally for her career stargazing and classifying the stars based on their stellar spectra. She would analyze those great, luminous celestial spheres of plasma in the sky and calculate the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, that discharges from them.

Time reports that Cannon, a graduate of Wellesley, was nicknamed the "Census Taker of the Sky," and curated an exhibition for Harvard's Observatory in 1932. In a Time magazine editorial on March 28 of that year, the exhibit was declared a "photographic plates of the heavens," "a permanent record of things understood or obscure beyond the night" and "a towering compendium of dots and streaks in photographic gelatine."

According to the ACL Astrophysics Group, this work eventually became known as the Harvard Classification Scheme, which Cannon created with Edward C. Pickering. Their studies became the paramount development of contemporary stellar classification to systematize and compartmentalize stars based on their temperatures.

In addition, during her time at Harvard, the legendary cosmos explorer cataloged 500,000 stars, according to Delaware Today.

According to Heavy, while she was in Europe to photograph the 1893 solar eclipse in Spain, the astronomer, then in her 30s, contracted Scarlet Fever and ultimately became completely deaf. She later ultimately opted out of marriage because she found it difficult to socialize.

Even more difficult, Cannon was an astronomer: an anomaly by all accounts.

"Contemporary science actually warned against women and education, in the belief that women were too frail to handle the stress," a Smithsonian article from the late 19th century said.

During her lifetime, Cannon became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Oxford University, receiving a Doctor of Science. In 1931, she became a member of the Royal Astronomical Society in Europe. The astronomer also became the first woman to be awarded the National Academy of Sciences's Henry Draper medal for research in astronomical physics, Time reports.

She died in 1941 in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the age of 77. The astronomer was honored posthumorously by the American Astronomical Society, an organization that presents the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy to the best female astronomers each year. Heavy reports that the winner of the award in 2014 was Emily Levesque.

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