Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887Various
Science
Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887
Various
Science -- Periodicals
Before we describe the principal results that have been attained, it
may be well to compare this with the other methods which have been
used to determine the height of clouds. A great deal of time and skill
and money have been spent at Kew in trying to perfect the photographic
method of measuring the height of clouds. Very elaborate cloud
cameras, or photo-nephoscopes, have been constructed, by means of
which photographs of a cloud were taken simultaneously from both ends
of a suitable base. The altitude and azimuth of the center of the
plate were read off by the graduated circles which were attached to
the cameras; and the angular measurements of any point of cloud on the
picture were calculated by proper measurements from the known center
of the photographic plate. When all this is done, the result ought to
be the same as if the altitude and azimuth of the point of the cloud
had been taken directly by an ordinary angle measuring instrument.
It might have been thought that there would be less chance of
mistaking the point of the cloud to be measured, if you had the
pictures from the two ends of the base to look at leisurely than if
you could only converse through a telephone with the observer at the
other end of the base. But in practice it is not so. No one who has
not seen such cloud photographs can realize the difficulty of
identifying any point of a low cloud when seen from two stations half
a mile or a whole mile apart, and for other reasons, which we will
give presently, the form of a cloud is not so well defined in a
photograph as it is to the naked eye.
At Kew an extremely ingenious sort of projector has been devised,
which gives graphically the required height of a cloud from two
simultaneous photographs at opposite ends of the same base, but it is
evident that this method is capable of none of the refinements which
have been applied to the Upsala measures, and that the rate of
vertical ascent or descent of a cloud could hardly be determined by
this method. But there is a far greater defect in the photographic
method, which at present no skill can surmount.
We saw that the altazimuth employed at Upsala had no lenses. The
meaning of this will be obvious to anyone who looks through an opera
glass at a faint cloud. He will probably see nothing for want of
contrast, and if anything of the nature of a telescope is employed,
only well-defined cloud outlines can be seen at all. The same loss of
light and contrast occurs with a photographic lens, and many clouds
that can be seen in the sky are invisible on the ground glass of the
camera. Cirrus and cirro-stratus--the very clouds we want most to
observe--are always thin and indefined as regards their form and
contrast against the rest of the sky, so that this defect of the
method is the more unfortunate.
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