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Proper Motion. In 1718 Halley detected the proper motions of Arcturus and Sirius. In 1738 J. Cassinis showed that the former had moved five minutes of arc since Tycho Brahe fixed its position. In 1792 Piazzi noted the motion of 61 Cygni as given above.
Under another form, nevertheless, it has been detected as indubitably solar. A triplet of dark lines low down in the red, photographed from the sun by Higgs and McClean, was clearly identified by Runge and Paschen in 1896 with the fundamental group of an oxygen series, first seen by Piazzi Smyth in the spectrum of a vacuum-tube in 1883.
BOUVARD. A great irregular enclosure, which appears to be still larger than Lagrange, S.E. of Piazzi, and close to the limb. It is bounded by a very lofty rampart, rising at a peak on the W. to 10,000 feet. It has a fine central mountain.
But in the cold season all must be white as a bride-cake; and fatal accidents occur in the Canada drifts. Professor Piazzi Smyth characterises the elevated region as cold enough at night, and stormy beyond measure in winter, when the south-wester, or equatorial upper current, produces a fearful climate. The view was remarkable: we were in sight of eighty craters.
Piazzi, scanning the zodiac from his observatory in Palermo, in the early hours of that first night of the century, noticed a hitherto unobserved star, which under higher power proved to be a planet. It presented a small irregular disc, and a few additional observations showed that it was progressing in the usual manner from west to east.
Humboldt says, 'The lava, broken into sharp pieces, leaves hollows in which we risked falling up to our waists. Von Buch mentions 'the sharp edges of glassy obsidian, as dangerous as the blades of knives. Wilde tamely paints the scene as a 'magnified rough-cast. Prof. Piazzi Smyth is, as usual, exact, but he suggests more difficulty than the traveller finds.
Then Piazzi, Lalande, Groombridge, and Bessel were followed by Argelander with his 324,000 stars, Rumker's Paramatta catalogue of the southern hemisphere, and the frequent catalogues of national observatories. Later the Astronomische Gesellschaft started their great catalogue, the combined work of many observatories. Other southern ones were Gould's at Cordova and Stone's at the Cape.
The Mare Imbrium also affords an example of a ridge, which, though shorter, is nearly as prominent, in that which runs from the bright little ring-plain Piazzi Smyth towards the west side of Plato. The region round Timocharis and other quarters of the Mare are likewise traversed by very noteworthy features of a similar class.
Our first visit was to the observatory, then under the direction of Professor C. Piazzi Smyth, who was also an Egyptologist of repute, having made careful measurements of the Pyramids, and brought out some new facts regarding their construction.
After Piazzi, Olbers, and Harding had discovered the small planets, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, he applied himself to the measurement of their angular diameters. His researches led him to the conclusion that these four new bodies could not properly be ranked with the planets, and he proposed to call them Asteroids a name now generally adopted.
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