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A set of measurements from his photographs of nearly fifty stars in the Pleiades, and their comparison with Bessel's places, enabled Dr. Gould to announce, in 1866, that during the intervening third of a century no changes of importance had occurred in their relative positions. And Mr.
The ring would in fact be in that case like a mighty arch, each portion of which would be drawn towards Saturn's centre by its own weight. This weight would be enormous if Bessel's estimate of the mass of the ring-system is correct. He made the mass of the ring rather greater than the mass of the earth an estimate which I believe to be greatly in excess of the truth.
Vincey, having done some more helpless staring, and having addressed a note of brief inquiry and left it in a conspicuous position on the bureau, returned in a very perplexed frame of mind to his own premises in Staple Inn. This affair had given him a shock. He was at a loss to account for Mr. Bessel's conduct on any sane hypothesis.
But Bessel's observations, between 1837 and 1840, of 61 Cygni, a star with the large proper motion of over 5", established its annual parallax to be 0".3483; and this was confirmed by Peters, who found the value 0".349. Later determinations for alpha2 Centauri, by Gill, make its parallax 0".75 This is the nearest known fixed star; and its light takes 4 1/3 years to reach us.
All these outrages were committed between half-past twelve and a quarter to two in the morning, and between those hours and, indeed, from the very moment of Mr. Bessel's first rush from his rooms at half-past nine in the evening they could trace the deepening violence of his fantastic career.
The great "Bonn Durchmusterung," in which 324,198 stars visible in the northern hemisphere are enumerated, and the corresponding "Atlas" published in 1857-63, constituting a picture of our sidereal surroundings of heretofore unapproached completeness, may be justly said to owe their origin to Bessel's initiative, and to form a sequel to what he commenced.
Bessel's first attempts at self-projection, in his experiments with Mr. Vincey, were, as the reader will remember, unsuccessful. But through all of them he was concentrating all his power and will upon getting out of the body "willing it with all my might," he says. At last, almost against expectation, came success. And Mr.
An inference so contradictory to received ideas obtained little credit, until Peters found, in 1851, that the apparent anomalies in the movements of Sirius could be completely explained by an orbital revolution in a period of fifty years. Bessel's prevision was destined to be still more triumphantly vindicated. On the 31st of January, 1862, while in the act of trying a new 18-inch refractor, Mr.
Under these circumstances, the knowledge acquired of its orbit was of more than usual accuracy, and showed conclusively that the comet was not a simple return of Bessel's; for this would involve a period of seventy-four years, whereas Tebbutt's comet cannot revisit the sun until after the lapse of two and a half millenniums.
This observation of Bond's was strongly confirmatory of Bessel's hypothesis of opposite polarities in such bodies' opposite sides. The protrusion towards the sun, on September 25, of a brilliant luminous fan-shaped sector completed the resemblance to Halley's comet. The appearance of the head was now somewhat that of a "bat's-wing" gaslight.
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