The New Astronomy

If we paused on the words with which our last chapter closed, the reader might perhaps so far gather an impression that the whole all-important subject of the solar energy was i...

The fall is usually preceded by a thundering sound, sometimes followed or accompanied by a peculiar noise described as like that of a flock of ducks rising from the water. The p...

The father of this very valuable class of observers appears to have been Messier, a Frenchman of the last century and of the purest type of the comet-hunters, endowed by Nature...

The “man in the moon” disappears when we are looking in a telescope, because we are then brought so near to details that the general features are lost; but he can be seen in any...

I have already described how, at the eclipse of 1870, I (with others) saw within the corona what seemed like rose and scarlet-colored mountains rising from the sun’s edge, an ap...

(What became of the French lens shown, it would be interesting to know. If it is still above ground, its fate has been better than that of the English one. It is said that the E...

I remember, too, that as I studied the sun there, and watched the volcanic outbursts on its surface, I felt that I possibly embraced in a threefold picture as many stages in the...

Let us first take a general view of the sun, and afterward study it in detail. What we see with a good telescope in this general view is something like this. Opposite are three...

Since, then, we are the children of the sun, and our bodies a product of its rays, as much as the ephemeral insects that its heat hatches from the soil, it is a worthy problem t...

That one star differs from another star in glory we have long heard, but our knowledge of physical things depends largely on our ability to answer the question, “how much?” and...

Like this appears also the condition of Jupiter (Fig. 62), the greatest of the planets, whose globe, eighty-eight thousand miles in diameter, turns so rapidly that the centrifug...

Before we try to answer this question, let us remember that the astonishing rapidity with which these forms change, and still more the fact that they do not by any means always...

I have spoken of the “unnatural” appearance of the light just before totality. This is not due to excited fancy, for there is something so essentially different from the natural...

What has just preceded will now help us to understand how it is that photography also succeeds so well in the incomparably fainter objects we are about to consider, and which ha...

I have written these pages, not for the professional reader, but with the hope of reaching a part of that educated public on whose support he is so often dependent for the means...

Moon: practical observations, 2; newly studied, 3; distance, 4–6; size, 5, 6, 140, 156; shadows (_q. v._), 36, 125; in sun-eclipse, 41; planetary relations, 117–174; and Jupiter...