Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly BodiesTodd, David P. (David Peck)
History
Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly Bodies
Todd, David P. (David Peck)
Astronomy
Kepler thought the corona was evidence of a lunar atmosphere; indeed, it
was not until the middle of the 19th century that its lack of relation
to the moon was finally demonstrated. Later observers, Wyberd in 1652
and Ulloa, got the impression that the corona turned round the disk
catherine-wheel fashion, "like an ignited wheel in fireworks, turning on
its center." But no later observer has reported anything of the sort.
Quite the contrary, there it stands against the black sky in motionless
magnificence a colorless pearly mass of wisps and streamers for the most
part nebulous and ill-defined, fading out very irregularly into the
black sky beyond, but with a complex interlacing of filaments, sometimes
very sharply defined near the solar poles. It defies the skill of artist
and draughtsman to sketch it before it is gone.
Photograph it? Yes, but there are troubles. Of course the camera work is
superior to sketches by hand. As Langley used to say, "The camera has no
nerves, and what it sets down we may rely on." Foremost among the
photographic difficulties is the wide variation in intensity of the
coronal light in different regions of the corona. If a plate is exposed
long enough to get the outer corona, the exceeding brightness of the
inner corona overexposes and burns out that part of the plate or film.
If the exposure is short, we get certain regions of the inner corona
excellently, but the outer regions are a blank because they can be
caught only by a long exposure.
So the only way is to take a series of pictures with a wide range of
exposures, and then by careful and artistic handwork, combine them all
into a single drawing. Wesley of London has succeeded eminently in work
of this character, and his drawings of the sun's corona, visible at
total eclipses from 1871 onward, in possession of the Royal Astronomical
Society, are the finest in existence. They give a vastly better idea of
the corona, as the eye sees it, than any single photograph possibly can.
The early observers apparently never thought of the corona as being
connected with the sun. It was a halo merely, and so drawn. Its real
structure was neither known, depicted, or investigated. Sketches were
structureless, as any aureola formed by stray sunlight grazing the moon
might naturally be. That the rays are curved and far from radial round
the sun was shown for the first time in the sketches of 1842, and in
1860 Sir Francis Galton observed that the long arms or streamers "do not
radiate strictly from the center."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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