James Baikie

“ With the unaided eye we view the sun as a small tranquil white disc; the telescope reveals to us that it is a vast globe convulsed by storms which involve the upheaval or submersion, within a few hours, of areas far greater than our own world; the spectroscope or the total eclipse adds to this revelation the further conception of a sweltering ocean of flame surrounding the whole solar surface, and rising in great jets of fire which would dissolve our whole earth as a drop of wax is melted in the flame of a candle ”

“ In the East some star-like points mark where the peaks of the eastern wall are beginning to catch the dawn. Then delicate streaks of light begin to stream across the floor, and the dark mass of shadow divides itself into long pointed shafts, which stretch across the plain like the spires of some great cathedral. The whole spectacle is so magnificent and strange that no words can do justice to it ”

“ No one can fail to notice the beautiful set of phases through which the moon passes every month. A little after the almanac has announced 'new moon,' she begins to appear as a thin crescent low down in the West, and setting shortly after the sun. Night by night we can watch her moving eastward among the stars, and showing more and more of her illuminated surface, until at first quarter half of her disc is bright. ”

“ It is very interesting, no doubt, to get a view of Jupiter or Saturn for one field's-breadth, and then to find, on attempting to readjust the instrument for another look, that the mounting has obligingly taken your star-gazing into its own hands, and is now directing your telescope to a different object altogether; but repetition of this form of amusement is apt to pall. A radically weak stand can never be made into a good one; the best plan is to get a properly proportioned mounting at once, and be done with it. ”

“ The chromosphere is, to use Miss Clerke's expression, 'a solar envelope, but not a solar atmosphere.' It surrounds the whole globe of the sun to a depth of probably from 3,000 to 4,000 miles, and has been compared to an ocean of fire, but seems rather to present the appearance of a close bristling covering of flames which rise above the surface of the visible sun like the blades of grass upon a lawn. Any one of these innumerable flames may be elevated into unusual proportions in obedience to the vast and mysterious forces which are at work beneath, and then becomes a prominence. ”

“ At present the southern belt is by far the most conspicuous feature of the surface, over-powering all other details by its prominence, while its northern rival has shrunk in visibility to a mere shadow of what it appears in drawings made in the seventies. Through all the changes of the last thirty years, however, one very remarkable feature of the planet has remained permanent at least in form, though varying much in visibility. With the exception of the canals of Mars, no feature of any of the planets has excited so much interest as the great red spot on Jupiter. ”

“ The writer well remembers the keen feeling of delight with which he first discovered that a very humble and commonplace telescope—nothing more, in fact, than a small ordinary spy-glass with an object-glass of about 1 inch in aperture—was able to reveal many of the more prominent features of lunar scenery; and the possessor of any telescope, no matter whether its powers be great or small, may be assured that there is enough work awaiting him on the moon to occupy the spare time of many years with one of the most enthralling of studies. ”

“ To quote Proctor's words: 'The golden disc, faintly striped with silver-tinted belts; the circling rings, with their various shades of brilliancy and colour; and the perfect symmetry of the system as it sweeps across the dark background of the field of view, combine to form a picture as charming as it is sublime and impressive.' Fortunately the main features of this beautiful picture are within the reach of very humble instruments. ”

“ Thus the rotation period adds its evidence to that already afforded by the variations in colour and in form of the planet's markings that here we are dealing with a body in a very different condition from that of any of the other members of our system hitherto met with. We have here no globe whose actual surface we can scrutinize, as we can in the case of Mars and the moon, but one whose solid nucleus, if it has such a thing, is perpetually veiled from us by a mantle which seems more akin to the photosphere of the sun than to anything else that we are acquainted with. ”

“ It is evident, on the most casual glance at the sky, that in the words of Scripture, 'One star differeth from another star in glory.' There are [pg 234] stars of every degree of brilliancy, from the sparkling white lustre of Sirius or Vega, down to the dim glimmer of those stars which are just on the edge of visibility, and are blotted out by the faintest wisp of haze. ”

“ Still, what the observer wants is not merely confirmation of the statement that Venus exhibits phases. The physical features of a planet are always the most interesting, and here Venus disappoints. That very brilliant lustre which makes her so beautiful an object to the naked eye, and which is even so exquisite in the telescopic view, is a bar to any great progress in the detection of the planet's actual features. ”

“ It is quite probable that were Mars to come as near to us as our own moon, the fancied resemblances would disappear almost entirely, and we should find that the red planet is only another instance of the infinite variety which seems to prevail among celestial bodies. That being so, it need scarcely be remarked that any talk about Martian inhabitants is, to say the least of it, premature. There may be such creatures, and they may be anything you like to imagine. There is no restraint upon the fancy, for no one knows anything about them, and no one is in the least likely to know anything. ”

“ The man to whom the human race owes a debt of gratitude in connection with any great invention is not necessarily he who, perhaps by mere accident, may stumble on the principle of it, but he who takes up [pg 2] the raw material of the invention and shows the full powers and possibilities which are latent in it. In the present case there is one such man to whom, beyond all question, we owe the telescope as a practical astronomical instrument, and that man is Galileo Galilei. ”

“ In nine cases out of ten the moon will be the first object to which the beginner turns his telescope, and he will find in our satellite a never-failing source of interest, and a sphere in which, by patient observation and the practice of steadily recording what is seen, he may not only amuse and instruct himself, but actually do work that may become genuinely useful in the furtherance of the science. ”

“ Let us, first of all, make the statement that any telescope, good, bad, or indifferent, is better than no telescope. There are some purists who would demur to such a statement, who make the beginner's heart heavy with the verdict that it is better to have no telescope at all than one that is not of the utmost perfection, and, of course, of corresponding costliness, and who seem to believe that the performance of an inferior glass may breed disgust at astronomy altogether. ”

“ This is a big word to apply to the using of a 21⁄2- or 3-inch telescope, but it represents the only way in which interest can be kept up. It does no good, either to the observer or to the science of astronomy, for him to take out his glass, have a glance at Jupiter and another at the Orion nebula, satisfy himself that the two stars of Castor are still two, wander over a few bright clusters, and then turn in, to repeat the same dreary process the next fine night. ”

“ The diameter of Venus, according to Barnard's measures with the 36-inch telescope of the Lick Observatory, is 7,826 miles; she is therefore a little smaller than our own world. Her distance from the sun is a trifle more than 67,000,000 miles, and her orbit, in strong contrast with that of Mercury, departs very slightly from the circular. Her density is a little less than that of the earth.
There is no doubt that, to the unaided eye, Venus is by far the most beautiful of all the planets, and that none of the fixed stars can for a moment vie with her in brilliancy. ”

“ A shaky mounting will spoil the performance of the best telescope that ever was made, and will only tantalize the observer with [pg 25] occasional glimpses of what might be seen under better conditions. Better have a little less aperture to the object-glass, and a good steady mounting, than an extra inch of objective and a mounting which robs you of all comfort in the using of your telescope. Beginners are indeed rather apt to be misled into the idea that the only matters of importance are the objective and its tube, and that money spent on the stand is money wasted. ”

“ Jupiter does not need, and will not stand, so much enlargement as either Mars or Saturn. It is quite easy to secure a very large disc, but over-magnifying is a great deal worse than useless: it is a fertile source of mistakes and illusions. If the student be content to make reasonable use of his means, and not to overpress either his instrument or his imagination, he will find upon Jupiter work full of absorbing interest, and may be able to make his own contribution to the serious study of the great planet. ”

“ It will be a matter of interest, however, for the observer to follow the four larger satellites, and to watch their rapid relative changes of position; their occultations, when they pass behind the globe of Jupiter; their eclipses, when they enter the great cone of shadow which the giant planet casts behind him into space; and, most beautiful of all, their transits. In occultations the curious phenomenon is sometimes witnessed of an apparent flattening of the planet's margin as the satellite approaches it at ingress or draws away from it at egress. ”

“ Even if this be the case, there still remains an inexhaustible fund of beauty and interest in the sun-spots. It does not take regular observation to enable one to be interested in the most wonderful intricacy and beauty of the solar detail, in its constant changes, and in the ideas which even casual work cannot fail to suggest as to the nature and mystery of that great orb which is of such infinite importance to ourselves. ”

“ He will find that the eye gets so accustomed to it as almost to forget that it is there, so that something of a shock may be experienced when a casual star-gazing friend, on looking at some bright object, remarks, as friends always do, 'What beautiful colours!' Denning records a somewhat extreme case in which a friend, who had been accustomed to observe with a refractor, absolutely resented the absence of the familiar colour fringe in the picture given by a reflector, which is the true achromatic in nature, though not in name. ”

“ Practically the most that can be done by the possessor of a small instrument is to convince himself of the reality of the phases, and of the non-existence of a satellite of any size, and to enjoy the exquisite and varying beauty of the spectacle which the planet presents. ”

“ The view that is given by even the smallest instrument is one of infinite variety and beauty; and its interest is accentuated by the fact that the moon is a sphere where practically every detail is new and strange.
If the moon be crescent, or near one or other of her quarters at the time of observation, the eye will at once be caught by a multitude of circular, or nearly circular depressions, more clearly marked the nearer they are to the line of division between the illuminated and unilluminated portions of the disc. ”

“ It is practically impossible for us to attain to any adequate conception of the enormous amount of both which is continually being radiated into space. Our own earth intercepts less than the two thousand millionth part of the solar energy. It has been estimated that if a column of ice 21⁄4 miles in diameter could be erected to span the huge interval of 92,700,000 miles between the earth and the sun, and if the sun could concentrate the whole of his heat upon it, this gigantic pillar of ice would be dissolved in a single second ”

“ The number of the stars, though very great, is not infinite.
A further fact which quickly becomes apparent to the naked eye is that the stars are not all of the same colour. Sirius, for example, is of a brilliant white, with a steely glitter; Betelgeux, comparatively near to it in the sky, is of a beautiful topaz tint, perhaps on the whole the most exquisite single star in the sky, so far as regards colour; Aldebaran is orange-yellow, while Vega is white with a bluish cast, as is also Rigel. These diversities become much more apparent when the telescope is employed. ”

“ The appearance of this 'tumultuous cloud, instinct with fire and nitre,' is always amazing. Sir Robert Ball considers it one of the three most remarkable objects visible in the northern heavens, the other two being Saturn and the Great Cluster in Hercules. But, beautiful and wonderful as both of these may be, the Orion Nebula conveys to the mind a sense of mystery which the others, in spite of their extraordinary features, never suggest. Absolutely staggering is the thought of the stupendous dimensions of the nebula. ”

“ No planet presents such a fine opportunity for colour-study as Jupiter, and on occasions of good seeing the richness of the tones is perfectly astonishing. In showing the natural colours of the planet the reflector has a great advantage over the refractor, and observers using the reflecting type of instrument should devote particular attention to this branch of the subject, as there is no doubt that the colour of the various features is liable to considerable, perhaps seasonal, variation, and systematic observation of its changes may prove helpful in solving the mystery of Jupiter's condition. ”

“ By prolonged study of a modern chart [pg 147] of Mars, and a little gentle stretching of the imagination, the most unskilled observer with the smallest instrument will detect a multitude of canals upon the planet, to which there is but one objection, that they do not exist. There is enough genuine interest about Mars, even when viewed with a small glass, without the importation of anything spurious. ”

“ Those who have paid even the smallest attention to the starry heavens are not, however, in the least likely to make any mistake about the sparkling silver radiance of Venus; and it would seem as though the smallest application of common-sense to the question of the apparent motion of a body travelling round an almost circular orbit which is viewed practically edgewise would solve for ever the question of the planet's alternate appearance on either side of the sun. ”