United States or Pakistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It came through a small window to the east, and made the peat-fire glow red by the contrast. Over the fire, from a great chain, hung a three-legged pot, in which something was slowly cooking. Between the fire and the sun-spot lay a cat, content with fate and the world. At the corner of the fire sat an old lady, in a chair high-backed, thick-padded, and covered with striped stuff.
The frequency of the Aurora Borealis was found by Wolf to follow the same period. In fact, it is closely allied in its cause to terrestrial magnetism. Wolf also collected old observations tracing the periodicity of sun-spots back to about 1700 A.D. Spoerer deduced a law of dependence of the average latitude of sun-spots on the phase of the sun-spot period.
He forwarded the news of his observation to Europe. The astronomer Wolff, well known for his sun-spot studies, carefully calculated the interval which had passed since Lescarbault saw Vulcan on March 26, 1859, and to his intense satisfaction was enabled to announce that this interval contained the calculated period of the planet an exact number of times.
The spectrum of a sun-spot is crossed by the same set of multitudinous dark lines, with some minor differences, visible in the ordinary solar spectrum. But there is also a general absorption, extending almost continuously from one end of the spot-spectrum to the other.
The following passage from a paper of considerable scientific interest by Professor Kirkwood, of Bloomington, Indiana, a well-known American astronomer, shows that the idea had occurred to him for a very different reason. He speaks here of a probable connection between the comet of 1843 and the great sun-spot which appeared in June 1843.
Seen beside the sun, by an observer on one of the planets, the earth would appear as an insignificant speck, which could be swallowed with ease by the whirling vortex of a sun-spot.
The significant feature, from our point of view, is the "sun-spot"; though the spot may be an area of millions of square miles. These areas are, of course, dark only by comparison with the intense light of the rest of the disk. The darkest part of them is 5000 times brighter than the full moon.
But the great library, crowded from floor to ceiling with books, the strange, white pages over which bowed the reader, while smiles flitted across his face as one sun-spot chases another over the warm April hills, the black marks causing the reader's tears to flow down upon the open page, made up a mystery the poor savage could not understand.
Schwabe failed to detect any reflection of the sun-spot period in his meteorological register. Gautier reached a provisional conclusion the reverse though not markedly the reverse of Herschel's.
Jally took the boys to the bank of the river and there showed them how to make a good picture with a strong reflection in the water. This was rather difficult because of the distribution of light over the plate. "Be careful when you point your camera toward the sun," said the photographer. "Otherwise you may get a sun-spot, or 'ghost, right in the center of your picture."
Word Of The Day