Sir Norman Lockyer

“ Wherever the ancient Egyptians came from—whether from a region where the moon was the time-measurer or not—so soon as they settled in the valley where the Nile then, as now, like a pendulum slowly beat the years by its annual inundation at the Summer Solstice, the solar basis of their calendar was settled. Hence it was Nature, the Nile—on the regulation of which depended the welfare of the country—which facilitated the establishment of the Egyptian year. Solstice and Nile-flood are the turning-points of the old Egyptian year. ”

“ Every one knows sufficient of photography to be aware that, if we wish to secure the image of a faint object, such as a faint star or a faint part of the moon, we must expose the plate for some little time, as we have to do in ordinary photography if the day is dull, and therefore the larger the aperture of the telescope the more light passes; and the shorter the focus is, and the more rapid the process, the shorter will be the exposure; if the focus is short, the image will be small ”

“ The instinctive love of beauty would do the rest, and make it a sine quâ non that the rosy-fingered dawn should be observable, and that the coloured light of the rising sun in the more boreal clime should render glorious a stately statue of the divinity. ”

“ Suppose that owing to imperfections in reflection and other matters two-thirds of the light is lost so that the eye receives 40,000 times the amount given by the unaided vision, then a sixth magnitude star—a star just visible to the naked eye—would have 40,000 times more light, and it might be removed to a distance 200 times as great as it at present is and still be visible in the field of the telescope, just as it at present is to the unaided eye. Can we judge how far off the stars are that are only just visible with Lord Rosse’s instrument? ”

“ This is the whole story of the black lines in the spectrum of the sun and in the spectra of the stars.
Here and there in the spectrum of these there are colours, or refrangibilities, of light which are not represented in light which comes from those bodies, and therefore there is nothing to paint the image of the slit in that particular part of the spectrum; we get what we call a dark line, which is the absence of the power of painting an image. ”

“ It is perfectly clear that if we have a means of calculating back the old positions of stars, and if we have any very old observations, we can help matters very much, because the old observations—if they were accurately made—would tell us that such and such a star rose with the sun at the solstice 129 or at the equinox at some special point of ancient time. If it be possible to calculate the time at which the star occupied that position with regard to the sun, we have an astronomical means of determining the time, within a few years, at which that particular observation was made. ”

“ The next matter to be considered is that the nearer the object A B is to the eye, the larger is the angle A, o, B, and also a, o, b, and therefore the image on the retina is larger; but there is a limit to the nearness to which the object can be brought, for, as we found with the candle, the distance between the lens and the image must be increased as the object approaches, or the curvature of the lens itself must be altered, for if not the ray forming the rays from each point of the object will be too divergent for the lens to be able to bring them to a focus. ”

“ Now, there can be little doubt that in the darkened sanctuary of an Egyptian temple the light of α Lyræ, one of the brightest stars in the northern heavens, rising in the clear air of Egypt, would be quite strong enough to throw into an apparent glow such highly-reflecting surfaces as those to which Herodotus refers. ”

“ If we imagine the lines of latitude and longitude on the earth to be projected, say as shadows thrown on the heavens by a light in the centre of the earth, the lines of right ascension (generally written R.A.) and declination (written Dec. or D.) will be perfectly depicted.
But there is another method of co-ordinating the stars, in which we have the words latitude and longitude used also, as we have said, for the heavens; meaning the distance of a star from the ecliptic instead of the equator, and its distance east or west measured by meridians at right angles to the ecliptic. ”

“ I assume the personification or the deification of the sun: I shall subsequently have to include the stars; I indicate special orientations of buildings devoted to the worship of the sun at one time of the year or another. But really both these things, though they seem improbable, have been carried down to our own day, quite independently of any question relating to Egypt. There is nothing new about them at all, and there is nothing really strange. When we go into an observatory we think nothing of turning our telescope towards Venus, or Jupiter, or Mars. ”

“ For astronomy of position, in other words for the measurement of space, we want to point the telescope accurately at an object. That is to say, in the first instance we want circles, and then we want the power of not only making perfect circles, but of reading them with perfect accuracy; and where the arc is so small that the circle, however finely divided, would help us but little, we want some means of measuring small arcs in the eyepiece of the telescope itself, where the object appears to us, as it is called, in the field of view ”

“ Every celestial body, whether we deal with the sun, moon, planet, or star, occupies at any moment a certain place in the sky, partly, though not wholly, defined by what we term its declination, i.e., its distance from the celestial equator. This declination is one of the two co-ordinates which are essential for enabling us to state accurately the position of any body on the celestial vault; and we must quite understand that if all these bodies rise and set, and rise and set visibly, the place of their rising or setting must be very closely connected with their declination. ”

“ An observer on a bad night could limit his aperture on a known star, when he might find that double the area given by an aperture of one inch was required as a limit for one of the stars of reference, and in that case he would know that half the usual amount of light from every star was stopped by atmospheric causes, and he would make the requisite corrections throughout his observations. We might also say that a star of a whole magnitude, greater or less than another, shall give us half or double the amount of light—in fact, that this shall be the ratio between magnitudes. ”

“ We cannot make a statement regarding every particular temple with absolute certainty, for the reason that in the case of most of the temples the best Egyptologists cannot give us the most precious piece of information which we require from the astronomical point of view—that is, the date of the foundation of the temple. If in the case of these temples it were absolutely certain that each temple was built at a certain time with a certain orientation, we could tell at once whether or not that temple was pointed to any particular star. ”

“ The fixed stars rise at the same point, and set at the same point; the same stars always rise together, and set together, and in their course from the east to the west they always preserve the same distance from one another. Now, as these appearances are only consistent with a circular movement, when the eye of the observer is equally distant from the circumference of the circle in every direction (as has been demonstrated in the treatise on Optics) , it follows that the stars move in a circle and are attached to a single body, and that the vision is equally distant from the circumference. ”

“ There are few impressions I ever received upon the remembrance of which I dwell with more pleasure than that of seeing the first burst of the Nile into one of the great channels of its annual overflow. All Nature shouts for joy. ”

“ For let us consider that a person on the earth stands, say, at the equator; then he will just be able to see along his north and south horizon the stars pointed to by the axis of the globe: if now he is transported northwards, his horizon will change 7with him; he will no longer be able to see the southern stars, but the northern ones will gradually rise above his horizon till he gets to the north pole, when the north pole star, instead of being on his horizon, as was the case when he was at the equator, will be over his head. ”

“ This generic symbolism suggests that the names Isis and Hathor are themselves generalisations, meaning an accompaniment of sunrise, whether that light be the dawn, or an heliacally-rising star, or even the moon. The generic symbol is the sun's disk and horns, which, I think, may not impossibly be a poetic development of the sign for sunrise. Isis and Hathor are two different ways of defining or thinking about a rising star—that is, a star heralding the sunrise, for such were the rising stars par excellence. ”

“ We do not however just bring the comet or other object into the middle of the field and then read off the circles, but we differentiate from the positions of known stars; so that all that has to be done in order to get as perfect a place for the comet as can be got for it by waiting till it comes to the meridian—which perhaps it will do in the day-time, when it will not be visible at all—is to determine its distance in right ascension and declination from a known star, by means of a micrometer. ”

“ The Euphrates and Tigris rise at the Spring Equinox—the religion was equinoxial, the temples were directed to the east. The Nile rises at a solstice—the religion was solstitial and the solar temples were directed no longer to the east. To the Egyptians the coming of the river to the parched land was as the sunrise chasing the darkness of the night; the sun-god of day conquering the star-gods of night ”

“ The best observing time is near the quarters, as near full moon the sun shines on the surface so nearly in the same direction as that in which we look, that there is no light and shade to throw objects into view. ”

“ I have already referred to the common practice of all ancient peoples that we know of to make sacrifices at dawn, and have shown how, in order to do this, they took their time from a star rising before the sun. An observation of the 247 so-called "heliacal rising" of a star—if the star were properly chosen—would give them the interval necessary for their preparations before the sun itself appeared; and, as the highest festival of all was that of New Year's Day, it was especially important that the work should be well done then. ”

“ If a star crosses one of the wires exactly as the clock is beating, he knows that it has passed the wire at some second, and he takes care to know what second that is; but if, instead of being absolutely coincident with one of the beats of the clock, it is half-way between one beat and another, or nearer to one beat than another, he estimates the fraction of a second, and by practice he has no difficulty at all in estimating divisions of time equal to tenths of a second, and at each 259particular wire in the eyepiece the transit of the star is thus minutely observed. ”

“ After a time, however, when the solstices and equinoxes had been made out, it would soon have been found that a temple once directed to the sun's rising place at harvest or sowing time, or at a solstice or an equinox, would continue for a long period to mark those critical points in the sun's yearly course; and when this yearly course had been finally made out it would soon be observed that the sun at any part of the agricultural year was as constant (indeed, as we now know, more constant) in its rising-and setting-place as a star. ”

“ THE DAWN OF STARGAZING. Some sciences are of yesterday; others stretch far back into the youth of time. Among these there is one of the beginnings of which we have lost all trace, so coeval was it with the commencement of man’s history; and that science is the one of which we have to trace the instrumental developments. ”

“ Knowing that the earth moves round the sun once a year, the year to us moderns is defined with the most absolute accuracy. In fact, we have three years: we have a sidereal year—that is, the time taken by the earth to go through exactly 360° of longitude; we have what is called the tropical year, which indicates the time taken by the earth to go through not quite 360°, to go from the first point of Aries till she meets it again; and since the equinoctial point advances to meet the earth, we talk about the precession of the equinoxes ”

“ It must also be noticed, that unless we have an ellipse so large that one focus shall represent the sun or a particular star we want to look at, this curve will not help us in bringing the light to one point, but if we use the curve called the parabola, which is practically an ellipse with one focus at an infinite distance, we do get the means of bringing all the rays from a distant object to a point. Hence the reflector, especially when of large diameter, is of no use for astronomical purposes without the parabolic curve. ”

“ It looks as if rough determinations of star places were made at about the same time in Egypt and Babylonia.
This abstract inquiry is now practically the only source of interest in astronomy to us; we no longer worship the sun; we no longer believe in astrology; we have our calendar; but we must have a Nautical Almanac calculated years beforehand, and some of us like to know a little about the universe which surrounds us. ”

“ If we assume for the moment that the observer is at the north pole, the pole star will be exactly over head, and therefore, supposing the pole star to absolutely represent the pole of the heavens, all the observer has to do is simply to take a reading of the pole star on the arc of his circle—call it 0° O ́ 0 ̋—and then use it as another zero to reckon polar distance from, seeing that every particular star or body we observe has so many degrees, minutes, seconds, or tenths of seconds, from the pole star. ”

“ It is perfectly true that this religious treatment of the planets is not of our own day: we have inherited it from the Greeks through the Latins; but we do not think it at all extraordinary that a planet should be called Venus or Jupiter. Thus we of to-day are completely in touch with the old Egyptians, except that the Egyptians were wiser in their generation, and looked after the sun at fixed points in the year and the constant stars instead of the variable planets. ”

“ We have not as yet discovered any of the statues employed in the ceremonial, but we know what they were like, what part they played, and of what materials they were made. They were animated.... They spoke, moved, acted—not metaphorically, but actually.... Interminable avenues of sphinxes, gigantic obelisks, massive pylons, halls of a hundred columns, mysterious chambers of perpetual night—in a word, the whole Egyptian Temple and its dependencies were built by way of a hiding-place for a performing puppet, of which the wires were worked by a priest. ”

“ No star would either rise or set—one half of the heavens would be always visible above his horizon, and the other half invisible; whereas an observer at the South Pole would see that half of the stars invisible to the observer at the northern one, because it was the half below the N. horizon. If the observer be on the equator, the movements of the stars all appear as indicated in the above diagram—that is, all the stars will rise and set, and each star in turn will be half its time above the horizon, and half its time below it. ”

“ The movement of the earth round the sun is in a plane which is called the plane of the ecliptic, and the axis of rotation of the earth is inclined to that plane at an angle of something like 231⁄2°. We can if we choose use the plane of the ecliptic to define the positions of the stars as we use the plane of the earth's equator. In that case we talk of distance from the ecliptic as celestial latitude, and along the ecliptic 53 from one of the points where it cuts the celestial equator as celestial longitude. ”

“ We have seen that the Egyptians chiefly, if not exclusively, observed a heavenly body and the position of other bodies in relation to it, when it was rising or setting, so that it was absolutely essential that the body which they were to observe should rise and set. Everybody knows that as seen in England there are many stars which neither rise nor set. The latitude of London being 51°, the elevation of the pole is 51°.
Hence, any star which lies within that distance from the pole cannot set, but sweeps round without touching the 343 horizon at all. ”