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
Young was the first to photograph a solar prominence in 1870, and twenty
years later Deslandres of Paris and Hale of Chicago independently
invented the spectroheliograph, by which the chromosphere and
prominences of the sun, as well as the disk of the sun itself, are all
photographed by monochromatic light on a single plate. Hale has
developed this instrument almost to the limit, first at the Yerkes
Observatory of the University of Chicago, and more recently at the Mount
Wilson Observatory of the Carnegie Institution, where spectroheliograms
of marvelous perfection are daily taken. It was with this instrument
that Hale discovered the effect of an electro-magnetic field in sun
spots which has revolutionized solar theories, a research impossible to
conceive of without the aid of photography.
When we apply Doppler's principle, photography becomes doubly
advantageous, whether we determine, as Dunér did and more recently
Adams, the sun's own rotation and find it to vary in different solar
latitudes, the equator going fastest; or apply the method to the sun's
corona at the east and west limbs of the sun, which Deslandres in 1893
proved to be rotating bodily with the sun, because of the measured
displacement of spectral lines of the corona in juxtaposition on the
photographic plate.
In the solar astronomy of measurement, too, photography has been
helpfully utilized, as in registering the transits of Mercury over the
sun's disk, for correcting the tables of the planet's orbital motion;
and most prominently in the action taken by the principal governments of
the world in sending out expeditions to observe the transits of Venus in
1874 and 1882, for the purpose of determining the parallax of Venus and
so the distance of the earth from the sun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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