Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Volume 22

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Astronomical Society of the Pacific., 1910
 

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Page 156 - On the evening of August 29, 1864, I directed my telescope for the first time to a planetary nebula in Draco. The reader may now be able to picture to himself to some extent the feeling of excited suspense, mingled with a degree of awe, with which, after a few minutes of hesitation, I put my eye to the spectroscope. Was I not about to look into a secret place of creation?
Page 150 - Then it was that an astronomical observatory began, for the first time, to take on the appearance of a laboratory. Primary batteries, giving forth noxious gases, were arranged outside one of the windows; a large induction coil stood mounted on a stand on wheels so as to follow the positions of the eye end of the telescope, together with a battery of several Leyden Jars; shelves with 'Bunsen burners, vacuum tubes, and bottles of chemicals, especially of specimens of pure metals, lined its walls.
Page 159 - This band in both spectra remained of nearly equal brightness for the same proportion of its length. On a subsequent evening, June 25, I repeated these comparisons, when the former observations were fully confirmed in every particular. On this evening I compared the brightest band with that of carbon in the larger spectroscope, which gives a dispersion of about five prisms. The remarkably close resemblance of the spectrum of the comet to the spectrum of carbon necessarily suggests the identity of...
Page 156 - ... of an evolution in the past, and still going on, of the heavenly hosts. A time surely existed when the matter now condensed into the sun and planets filled the whole space occupied by the solar system, in the condition of gas, which then appeared as a glowing nebula, after the order, it may be, of some now existing in the heavens. There remained no room for doubt that the nebulae, which our telescopes reveal to us, are the early stages of long processions of cosmical events, which correspond...
Page 155 - The reader may now be able to picture to himself to some extent the feeling of excited suspense, mingled with a degree of awe, with which, after a few moments of hesitation, I put my eye to the spectroscope. Was I not about to look into a secret place of creation ? I looked into the spectroscope.
Page 197 - The fourth conference of the International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research was held at the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory, August 31 to September 2, 1910.
Page 153 - The modern silver-bromide gelatine plate, except for its grained texture, meets the needs of the astronomer at all points. It possesses extreme sensitiveness ; it is always ready for use ; it can be placed in any position ; it can be exposed for hours ; lastly, it does not need immediate development, and for this reason can be exposed again to the same object on succeeding nights, so as to make up by several instalments, as the weather may permit, the total time of exposure which is deemed necessary.
Page 155 - I will let him speak in his own words : — " 'A shining fluid of a nature unknown to us. " 'What a field of novelty is here opened to our conceptions ! . . . We may now explain that very extensive nebulosity, expanded over more than sixty degrees of the heavens, about the constellation of Orion; a luminous matter accounting much better for it than clustering stars at a distance. . . . " 'If this matter is self-luminous, it seems more fit to produce a star by its condensation than to depend on the...
Page 101 - STELLAR MOTIONS. With Special Reference to Motions Determined by Means of the Spectrograph. By WILLIAM WALLACE CAMPBELL, Sc.D., LL.D., Director of the Lick Observatory, University of California.
Page 155 - ... sandheaps" too remote to be separated into their component stars. Lord Rosse himself was careful to point out that it would be unsafe from his observations to conclude that all nebulosity is but the glare of stars too remote to be resolved by our instruments. In 1858 Herbert Spencer showed clearly that, notwithstanding the Parsonstown revelations, the evidence from the observation of nebulae up to that time was really in favour of their being early stages of an evolutional progression.

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