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Updated: May 2, 2025
A photographic photometry of all the lucid stars, modelled on the visual photometry of 1884, is promised from the same copious source of novelties. The magnitudes of the stars in the Draper Catalogue were determined, so to speak, spectrographically.
The Harvard photometry was extended, on the same scale, to the opposite pole in a catalogue of the magnitudes of 7,922 southern stars, founded on Professor Bailey's observations in Peru, 1889-91. Measurements still more comprehensive were subsequently executed at the primary establishment.
The instrument employed by them is constructed on the polarising principle as adapted by Zöllner. Photographic photometry has meanwhile risen to an importance if anything exceeding that of visual photometry. For the usefulness of the great international star-chart now being prepared would be gravely compromised by systematic mistakes regarding the magnitudes of the stars registered upon it.
Its precedence over its rivals Vega and Capella, long in dispute, has been settled by the Harvard photometry. You notice that the color of Arcturus, when it has not risen far above the horizon, is a yellowish red, but when the star is near mid-heaven the color fades to light yellow. The hue is possibly variable, for it is recorded that in 1852 Arcturus appeared to have nearly lost its color.
They had ascertained the dimensions of the earth; they had registered or catalogued all the stars visible in their heavens, giving to those of the larger magnitudes the names they still bear on our maps and globes; they determined the true length of the year, discovered astronomical refraction, invented the pendulum-clock, improved the photometry of the stars, ascertained the curvilinear path of a ray of light through the air, explained the phenomena of the horizontal sun and moon, and why we see those bodies before they have risen and after they have set; measured the height of the atmosphere, determining it to be fifty-eight miles; given the true theory of the twilight, and of the twinkling of the stars.
Every astronomer wanted a larger telescope than his neighbors, with which to measure double stars. If he could not get such an instrument, he measured the positions of the stars with a transit circle. Then came astrophysics, including photography, spectroscopy and photometry.
Stellar photometry, initiated by the elder Herschel, and provided with exact methods by his son at the Cape, by Steinheil and Seidel at Munich, has of late years assumed the importance of a separate department of astronomical research.
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