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I accepted the invitation with pleasure. We duly reached the Observatory when Struve introduced me to the Father. Secchi gave me a most cordial and unlooked-for welcome. "This," he said, "is a most extraordinary interview; as I am at this moment making a representation of your willow-leaf-shaped constituents of the Solar surface!"
By this long practice of mine, you may know how appreciable this satisfactory standard scale is to your humble servant. In the winter of 1865 I visited Italy. While at Rome, in April, I had the pleasure of meeting Otto W. von Struve, the celebrated Russian astronomer. He invited me to accompany him on a visit to Father Secchi at his fine observatory of the Collegio Romano.
They are commonly distinguished by a deep red tint, and gleam like rubies in the field of the telescope. Father Secchi, who in 1867 detected the peculiarity of their analyzed light, ascribed it to the presence of carbon in some form in their atmospheres; and this was confirmed by the researches of H. C. Vogel, director of the Astro-physical Observatory at Potsdam.
Its true character of a continuous solar envelope was inferred from these data by Grant, Swan, and Littrow, and was by Father Secchi, after the great eclipse of 1860, formally accepted as established. Several prominences of remarkable forms, especially one variously compared to a Turkish scimitar, a sickle, and a boomerang, were seen in 1851.
Clearly such an instrument must prove a veritable magic wand in the hands of the astronomer. Very soon eager astronomers all over the world were putting the spectroscope to the test. Kirchhoff himself led the way, and Donati and Father Secchi in Italy, Huggins and Miller in England, and Rutherfurd in America, were the chief of his immediate followers.
"What weather have we to-day?" asked the Cardinal after a pause. "Scirocco, Eminence." "Ah, I thought so especially this morning, very early. It is very disagreeable. Since Padre Secchi found that the scirocco really brings the sand of the desert with it, I dislike it more than ever. And what have you been doing, Don Paolo? Have you been to see about the crucifix?"
Bu. 339 is a fine double, magnitudes eight and nine and a half, distance 1.3", p. 216°. The planetary nebula 2102 is about 1' in diameter, pale blue in color, and worth looking at, because it is brighter than most objects of its class. Tempel and Secchi have given wonderful descriptions of it, both finding multitudes of stars intermingled with nebulous matter.
They are always accompanied by, or superposed upon, a spectrum of dark lines, in producing which sodium and iron have an obvious share; and certain bright rays, noticed by Secchi with imperfect appliances as enhancing the chiaroscuro effects in carbon-stars, came out upon plates exposed by Hale and Ellerman in 1898 with the stellar spectrograph of the Yerkes Observatory.
Moreover, its premonitory symptom in the fading out of these rays had been actually described by Secchi in 1868, and looked for by Young as the moon covered the sun in August 1869. But with the slit of his spectroscope placed normally to the sun's limb, the bright lines gave a flash too thin to catch the eye.
Arago somewhat hastily inferred from experiments with the polariscope the wholly gaseous nature of the visible disc of the sun. Herschel and Secchi indicated a cloud-like structure as that which would best harmonise the whole of the evidence at command.
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