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Updated: June 26, 2025
A strange unearthly being; lonely, dwelling far apart from the thoughts and cares of the planet on which he lives, an enthusiast who gives his life to knowledge; a student of antiquity, to whom the records of the geologist are modern pages in the great volume of being, and the pyramids a memorandum of yesterday, as the eclipse or occultation that is to take place thousands of years hence is an event of to-morrow in the diary without beginning and without end where he enters the aspect of the passing moment as it is read on the celestial dial.
One night when he was on duty watching a lunar occultation, he saw something sweep across the disc of the full moon just as the captain and officers of the St. Louis had seen that same something sweep across the disc of the rising sun. What else could it be if not the Astronef?
His first recorded observation, of an occultation of Aldebaran, was made in 1497, and he is not known to have made as many as fifty astronomical observations, while, of the few he did make and use, at least one was more than half a degree in error, which would have been intolerable to such an observer as Hipparchus.
It happened this night that she passed over the star Fomalhaut an occultation which I watched with great interest through an excellent field-glass, but which lasted only for about half a minute. About an hour before midnight the two moons passed each other in the Eastern sky; both gibbous at the moment, like our Moon in her last quarter.
So far as we can infer from their work, they made the observations merely because an occultation was an interesting thing to see; and they were men of sufficient scientific experience and training to have acquired the excellent habit of noting the time at which a phenomenon was observed. But they were generally satisfied with simply putting down the clock time.
Though their numbers was seven, only six stars are visible, for Electra, one of them, it is said, left her place that she might not behold the ruin of Troy, for that city was founded by her son Dardanus. The sight had such an effect on her sisters that they have looked pale ever since. Mr. Longfellow has a poem on the "Occultation of Orion."
"I saw in the observatory a timepiece with a double second-hand; one of these could be stopped by a touch, and would, in that way, show an observer the instant when he thought a phenomenon, as an occultation for instance, had occurred, and yet permit him to go on with his count of the seconds, and, if necessary, correct his first impression.
It was not till after the middle of the century, when the telescope had been made part of astronomical instruments for finding the altitude of a heavenly body, and after the pendulum clock had been invented by Huyghens, that the time of an occultation could be fixed with the required exactness.
In the Antarctic, conditions for observing occultation are rather favourable during the winter, since, fifth-magnitude stars can be seen with a small telescope at any time during the twenty-four hours if the sky is clear, and the moon is also often above the horizon for a large fraction of the time.
On one occasion I walked from Somerville twelve miles to a village where there was a vacancy, but the trustees, after looking me over, concluded I was too young and inexperienced for their large school. That night the occultation of Venus by the moon took place. I remember gazing at it long and long.
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