Cannon received a formal Harvard appointment as William C. Bond Astronomer in 1938.
In 1938, two years before her retirement, Annie Jump Cannon finally received a regular, formal appointment at Harvard University as the William C. Bond Astronomer, a named position honoring the observatory's first director.
This appointment was significant in that it represented one of the first times Cannon held a formally recognized faculty-level position at Harvard, after more than four decades of work at the observatory that had often been conducted under informal or lesser titles, with compensation far below that of her male colleagues despite her being, by any measure, one of the most productive and internationally celebrated astronomers of her era.
The appointment came only after decades of advocacy, both by Cannon herself and by successive observatory directors, to secure appropriate institutional recognition for the women whose labor had been essential to Harvard's astronomical research program. It stands as a symbol of the gradual, hard-won institutional progress toward gender equity within elite American scientific institutions.
Though it arrived late in her career, the William C. Bond Astronomer title provided Cannon with a fitting formal capstone to her decades of service, immediately preceding her retirement in 1940 and serving as an acknowledgment, however overdue, of a scientific legacy that had already been celebrated on the international stage for years.