Part 1

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.

More detail can be found at the end of the book.

PRACTICAL TALKS BY AN ASTRONOMER

PRACTICAL TALKS BY AN ASTRONOMER

BY HAROLD JACOBY

ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1902

COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published, April, 1902

TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK

PREFACE

The present volume has not been designed as a systematic treatise on astronomy. There are many excellent books of that kind, suitable for serious students as well as the general reader; but they are necessarily somewhat dry and unattractive, because they must aim at completeness. Completeness means detail, and detail means dryness.

But the science of astronomy contains subjects that admit of detached treatment; and as many of these are precisely the ones of greatest general interest, it has seemed well to select several, and describe them in language free from technicalities. It is hoped that the book will thus prove useful to persons who do not wish to give the time required for a study of astronomy as a whole, but who may take pleasure in devoting a half-hour now and then to a detached essay on some special topic.

Preparation of the book in this form has made it suitable for prior publication in periodicals; and the several essays have in fact all been printed before. But the intention of collecting them into a book was kept in mind from the first; and while no attempt has been made at consecutiveness, it is hoped that nothing of merely ephemeral value has been included.

CONTENTS

PAGE

NAVIGATION AT SEA 1

THE PLEIADES 10

THE POLE-STAR 18

NEBULÆ 27

TEMPORARY STARS 37

GALILEO 47

THE PLANET OF 1898 58

HOW TO MAKE A SUN-DIAL 69

PHOTOGRAPHY IN ASTRONOMY 81

TIME STANDARDS OF THE WORLD 111

MOTIONS OF THE EARTH'S POLE 131

SATURN'S RINGS 140

THE HELIOMETER 152

OCCULTATIONS 161

MOUNTING GREAT TELESCOPES 170

THE ASTRONOMER'S POLE 184

THE MOON HOAX 199

THE SUN'S DESTINATION 210

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE MOON. FIRST QUARTER _Frontispiece_ _Photographed by Loewy and Puiseux, February 13, 1894._

FACING PAGE

SPIRAL NEBULA IN CONSTELLATION LEO 26 _Photographed by Keeler, February 24, 1900._

NEBULA IN ANDROMEDA 28 _Photographed by Barnard, November 21, 1892._

THE "DUMB-BELL" NEBULA 34 _Photographed by Keeler, July 31, 1899._

STAR-FIELD IN CONSTELLATION MONOCEROS 84 _Photographed by Barnard, February 1, 1894._

SOLAR CORONA. TOTAL ECLIPSE 108 _Photographed by Campbell, January 22, 1898; Jeur, India._

FORTY-INCH TELESCOPE, YERKES OBSERVATORY 170

YERKES OBSERVATORY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 176

PRACTICAL TALKS BY AN ASTRONOMER

NAVIGATION AT SEA

A short time ago the writer had occasion to rummage among the archives of the Royal Astronomical Society in London, to consult, if possible, the original manuscripts left by one Stephen Groombridge, an English astronomer of the good old days, who died in 1832. It was known that they had been filed away about a generation ago, by the late Sir George Airy, who was Astronomer Royal of England between the years 1835 and 1881. After a long search, a large and dusty box was found and opened. It was filled with documents, of which the topmost was in Sir George's own handwriting, and began substantially as follows:

"List of articles within this box. "No. 1, This list, "No. 2, etc., etc."

Astronomical precision can no further go: he had listed even the list itself. Truly, Airy was rightly styled "prince of precisians." A worthy Astronomer Royal was he, to act under the royal warrant of Charles II., who established the office in 1675. Down to this present day that warrant still makes it the duty of His Majesty's Astronomer "to apply himself with the most exact care and diligence to the rectifying of the tables of the motions of the heavens and the places of the fixed stars, in order to find out the so much desired longitude at sea, for the perfecting the art of navigation."

The "so much desired longitude at sea" is, indeed, a vastly important thing to a maritime nation like England. And only in comparatively recent years has it become possible and easy for vessels to be navigated with safety and convenience upon long voyages. The writer was well acquainted with an old sea-captain of New York, who had commanded one of the earliest transatlantic steamers, and who died only a few years ago. He had a goodly store of ocean yarn, fit and ready for the spinning, if he could but find someone who, like himself, had known and loved the ocean. In his early sea-going days, only the wealthiest of captains owned chronometers. This instrument is now considered indispensable in navigation, but at that time it was a new invention, very rare and costly. Upon a certain voyage from England to Rio Janeiro, in South America, the old captain could remember the following odd method of navigation: The ship was steered by compass to the southward and westward, more or less, until the skipper's antique quadrant showed that they had about reached the latitude of Rio. Then they swung her on a course due west by compass, and away she went for Rio, relying on the lookout man forward to keep the ship from running ashore. For after a certain lapse of time, being ignorant of the longitude, they could not know whether they would "raise" the land within an hour or in six weeks. We are glad of an opportunity to put this story on record, for the time is not far distant when there will be no man left among the living who can remember how ships were taken across the seas in the good old days before chronometers.

Anyone who has ever been a passenger on a great transatlantic liner of to-day knows what an important, imposing personage is the brass-bound skipper. A very different creature is he on the deck of his ship from the modest seafaring man we meet on land, clad for the time being in his shore-going togs. But the captain's dignity is not all brass buttons and gold braid. He has behind him the powerful support of a deep, delightful mystery. He it is who "takes the sun" at noon, and finds out the ship's path at sea. And in truth, regarded merely as a scientific experiment, the guiding of a vessel across the unmarked trackless ocean has few equals within the whole range of human knowledge. It is our purpose here to explain quite briefly the manner in which this seeming impossibility is accomplished. We shall not be able to go sufficiently into details to enable him who reads to run and navigate a magnificent steamer. But we hope to diminish somewhat that small part of the captain's vast dignity which depends upon his mysterious operations with the sextant.

To begin, then, with the sextant itself. It is nothing but an instrument with which we can measure how high up the sun is in the sky. Now, everyone knows that the sun slowly climbs the sky in the morning, reaches its greatest height at noon, and then slowly sinks again in the afternoon. The captain simply begins to watch the sun through the sextant shortly before noon, and keeps at it until he discovers that the sun is just beginning to descend. That is the instant of noon on the ship. The captain quickly glances at the chronometer, or calls out "noon" to an officer who is near that instrument. And so the error of the chronometer becomes known then and there without any further astronomical calculations whatever. Navigators can also find the chronometer error by sextant observations when the sun is a long way from noon. The methods of doing this are somewhat less simple than for the noon observation; they belong to the details of navigation, into which we cannot enter here.

Incidentally, the captain also notes with the sextant how high the sun was in the sky at the noon observation. He has in his mysterious "chart-room" some printed astronomical tables, which tell him in what terrestrial latitude the sun will have precisely that height on that particular day of the year. Thus the terrestrial latitude becomes known easily enough, and if only the captain could get his longitude too, he would know just where his ship was that day at noon.

We have seen that the sextant observations furnish the error of the chronometer according to ship's time. In other words, the captain is in possession of the correct local time in the place where the ship actually is. Now, if he also had the correct time at that moment of some well-known place on shore, he would know the difference in time between that place on shore and the ship. But every traveller by land or sea is aware that there are always differences of time between different places on the earth. If a watch be right on leaving New York, for instance, it will be much too fast on arriving at Chicago or San Francisco; the farther you go the larger becomes the error of your watch. In fact, if you could find out how much your watch had gone into error, you would in a sense know how far east or west you had travelled.

Now the captain's chronometer is set to correct "Greenwich time" on shore before the ship leaves port. His observations having then told him how much this is wrong on that particular day, and in that particular spot where the ship is, he knows at once just how far he has travelled east or west from Greenwich. In other words, he knows his "longitude from Greenwich," for longitude is nothing more than distance from Greenwich in an east-and-west direction, just as latitude is only distance from the equator measured in a north-and-south direction. Greenwich observatory is usually selected as the beginning of things for measuring longitudes, because it is almost the oldest of existing astronomical establishments, and belongs to the most prominent maritime nation, England.

One of the most interesting bits of astronomical history was enacted in connection with this matter of longitude. From what has been said, it is clear that the ship's longitude will be obtained correctly only if the chronometer has kept exact time since the departure of the ship from port. Even a very small error of the chronometer will throw out the longitude a good many miles, and we can understand readily that it must be difficult in the extreme to construct a mechanical contrivance capable of keeping exact time when subjected to the rolling and pitching of a vessel at sea.

It was as recently as the year 1736 that the first instrument capable of keeping anything like accurate time at sea was successfully completed. It was the work of an English watchmaker named John Harrison, and is one of the few great improvements in matters scientific which the world owes to a desire for winning a money prize. It appears that in 1714 a committee was appointed by the House of Commons, with no less a person than Sir Isaac Newton himself as one of its members, to consider the desirability of offering governmental encouragement for the invention of some means of finding the longitude at sea. Finally, the British Government offered a reward of $50,000 for an instrument which would find the longitude within sixty miles; $75,000, if within forty miles, and $100,000, if within thirty miles. Harrison's chronometer was finished in 1736, but he did not receive the final payment of his prize until 1764.

We shall not enter into a detailed account of the vexatious delays and official procedures to which he was forced to submit during those twenty-eight long years. It is a matter of satisfaction that Harrison lived to receive the money which he had earned. He had the genius to plan and master intricate mechanical details, but perhaps he lacked in some degree the ability of tongue and pen to bring them home to others. This may be the reason he is so little known, though it was his fortune to contribute so large and essential a part to the perfection of modern navigation. Let us hope this brief mention may serve to recall his memory from oblivion even for a fleeting moment; that we may not have written in vain of that longitude to which his life was given.

THE PLEIADES

Famed in legend; sung by early minstrels of Persia and Hindustan;

"--like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid";

yonder distant misty little cloud of Pleiades has always won and held the imagination of men. But it was not only for the inspiration of poets, for quickening fancy into song, that the seven daughters of Atlas were fixed upon the firmament. The problems presented by this group of stars to the unobtrusive scientific investigator are among the most interesting known to astronomy. Their solution is still very incomplete, but what we have already learned may be counted justly among the richest spoils brought back by science from the stored treasure-house of Nature's secrets.

The true student of astronomy is animated by no mere vulgar curiosity to pry into things hidden. If he seeks the concealed springs that move the complex visible mechanism of the heavens, he does so because his imagination is roused by the grandeur of what he sees; and deep down within him stirs the true love of the artist for his art. For it is indeed a fine art, that science of astronomy.

It can have been no mere chance that has massed the Pleiades from among their fellow stars. Men of ordinary eyesight see but a half-dozen distinct objects in the cluster; those of acuter vision can count fourteen; but it is not until we apply the space-penetrating power of the telescope that we realize the extraordinary scale upon which the system of the Pleiades is constructed. With the Paris instrument Wolf in 1876 catalogued 625 stars in the group; and the searching photographic survey of Henry in 1887 revealed no less than 2,326 distinct stars within and near the filmy gauze of nebulous matter always so conspicuous a feature of the Pleiades.

The means at our disposal for the study of stellar distances are but feeble. Only in the case of a very small number of stars have we been able to obtain even so much as an approximate estimate of distance. The most powerful observational machinery, though directed by the tried skill of experience, has not sufficed to sound the profounder depths of space. The Pleiad stars are among those for which no measurement of distance has yet been made, so that we do not know whether they are all equally far away from us. We see them projected on the dark background of the celestial vault; but we cannot tell from actual measurement whether they are all situated near the same point in space. It may be that some are immeasurably closer to us than are the great mass of their companions; possibly we look through the cluster at others far behind it, clinging, as it were, to the very fringe of the visible universe.

Farther on we shall find evidence that something like this really is the case. But under no circumstances is it reasonable to suppose that the whole body of stars can be strung out at all sorts of distances near a straight line pointing in the direction of the visible cluster. Such a distribution may perhaps remain among the possibilities, so long as we cannot measure directly the actual distances of the individual stars. But science never accepts a mere possibility against which we can marshal strong circumstantial evidence. We may conclude on general principles that the gathering of these many objects into a single close assemblage denotes community of origin and interests.

The Pleiades then really belong to one another. What is the nature of their mutual tie? What is their mystery, and can we solve it? The most obvious theory is, of course, suggested by what we know to be true within our own solar system. We owe to Newton the beautiful conception of gravitation, that unique law by means of which astronomers have been enabled to reduce to perfect order the seeming tangle of planetary evolutions. The law really amounts, in effect, to this: All objects suspended within the vacancy of space attract or pull one another. How they can do this without a visible connecting link between them is a mystery which may always remain unsolved. But mystery as it is, we must accept it as an ascertained fact. It is this pull of gravitation that holds together the sun and planets, forcing them all to follow out their due and proper paths, and so to continue throughout an unbroken cycle until the great survivor, Time, shall be no more.

This same gravitational attraction must be at work among the Pleiades. They, too, like ourselves, must have bounds and orbits set and interwoven, revolutions and gyrations far more complex than the solar system knows. The visual discovery of such motion of rotation among the Pleiades may be called one of the pressing problems of astronomy to-day. We feel sure that the time is ripe, and that the discovery is actually being made at the present moment: for a generation of men is not too great a period to call a moment, when we have to deal with cosmic time.

It is indeed the lack of observations extending through sufficient centuries that stays our hand from grasping the coveted result. The Pleiades are so far from us that we cannot be sure of changes among them. Magnitudes are always relative. It matters not how large the actual movements may be; if they are extremely small in comparison with our distance, they must shrink to nothingness in our eyes. Trembling on the verge of invisibility, elusive, they are in that borderland where science as yet but feels her way, though certain that the way is there.

The foundations of exact modern knowledge of the group were laid by Bessel about 1840. With the modesty characteristic of the great, he says quite simply that he has made a number of measures of the Pleiades, thinking that the time may come when astronomers will be able to find some evidence of motion. In this unassuming way he prefaces what is still the classic model of precision and thoroughness in work of this kind. Bessel cleared the ground for a study of inter-stellar motion within the close star-clusters; and it is probable that only by such study may we hope to demonstrate the universality of the law of gravitation in cosmic space.

Bessel's acuteness in forecasting the direction of coming research was amply verified by the work of Elkin in 1885 at Yale College. Provided with a more modern instrument, but similar to Bessel's, Elkin was able to repeat his observations with a slight increase of precision. Motions in the interval of forty-five years, sufficiently great to hint at coming possibilities, were shown conclusively to exist. Six stars at all events have been fairly excluded from the group on account of their peculiar motions shown by Elkin's research. It is possible that they are merely seen in the background through the interstices of the cluster itself, or they may be suspended between us and the Pleiades, in either case having no real connection with the group. Finally, these observations make it reasonably certain that many of the remaining mass of stars really constitute a unit aggregation in space. Astronomers of a coming generation will again repeat the Besselian work. At present we have been able to use his method only for the separation from the true Pleiades of chance stars that happen to lie in the same direction. Let us hope that man shall exist long enough upon this earth to see the clustered stars themselves begin and carry out such gyrations as gravitation imposes.

These will doubtless be of a kind not even suggested by the lesser complexities of our solar system. For the most wonderful thing of all about the Pleiades seems to point to an intricacy of structure whose details may be destined to shake the confidence of the profoundest mathematician. There is an extraordinary nebulous condensation that seems to pervade the entire space occupied by the stellar constituents of the group. The stars are swimming in a veritable sea of luminous cloud. There are filmy tenuous places, and again condensing whirls of material doubtless still in the gaseous or plastic stage. Most noticeable of all are certain almost straight lines of nebula that connect series of stars. In one case, shown upon a photograph made by Henry at Paris, six stars are strung out upon such a hazy line. We might give play to fancy, and see in this the result of some vast eruption of gaseous matter that has already begun to solidify here and there into stellar nuclei. But sound science gives not too great freedom to mere speculative theories. Her duty has been found in quiet research, and her greatest rewards have flowed from imaginative speculation, only when tempered by pure reason.

THE POLE-STAR

One of the most brilliant observations of the last few years is Campbell's recent discovery of the triple character of this star. Centuries and centuries ago, when astronomy, that venerable ancient among the sciences, was but an infant, the pole-star must have been considered the very oldest of observed heavenly bodies. In the beginning it was the only sure guide of the navigator at night, just as to this day it is the foundation-stone for all observational stellar astronomy of precision. There has never been a time in the history of astronomy when the pole-star might not have been called the most frequently measured object in the sky of night. So it is indeed strange that we should find out something altogether new about it after all these ages of study.

But the importance of the discovery rests upon a surer foundation than this. The method by which it has been made is almost a new one in the science. A generation ago, men thought the "perfect science," for so we love to call astronomy, could advance only by increasing a little the exact precision of observation. The citadel of perfect truth might be more closely invested; the forces of science might push forward step by step; the machinery of research might be strengthened, but that a new engine of investigation would be discovered capable of penetrating where no telescope can ever reach, this, indeed, seemed far beyond the liveliest hope of science. Even the discoverer of the spectroscope could never have dreamed of its possibilities, could never have foreseen its successes, its triumphs.

The very name of this instrument suggests mystery to the popular mind. It is set down at once among the things too difficult, too intricate, too abstruse to understand. Yet in its essentials there is nothing about the spectroscope that cannot be made clear in a few words. Even the modern "undulatory theory" of light itself is terrible only in the length of its name. Anyone who has seen the waves of ocean roll, roll, and ever again roll in upon the shore, can form a very good notion of how light moves. 'Tis just such a series of rolling waves; started perhaps from some brilliant constellation far out upon the confining bounds of the visible universe, or perhaps coming from a humble light upon the student's table; yet it is never anything but a succession of rolling waves. Only, unlike the waves of the sea, light waves are all excessively small. We should call one whose length was a twenty-thousandth of an inch a big one!