Recent Progress in Astronomical 

 Photography^ 



By C. E. Kenneth Mees 



Director, Research Laboratories 

 Eastman Kodak Co. 



[With 6 plates] 



In the great epic poem which has come down to us under the name 

 of the Book of Job, God issues a challenge to man in which he sets 

 forth the wonders of the universe and asks whether the mind of man 

 is such that he can comprehend them. Turning to the stars, he says, 

 "Canst thou loose the bands of Orion ? Knowest thou the ordinances 

 of heaven?" And as if to make a suggestion for the meeting of the 

 challenge, he asks, "Where is the way where light dwelleth?" 



All that we know of the universe, apart from that small portion of 

 the earth which appeals to our other senses, we obtain through our 

 eyes by the medium of light. Long before the Book of Job was 

 written, the apparent motion of the heavenly bodies had been studied 

 and mapped, primarily with a view to the measurement of time, since 

 the rotation of the earth on its axis and its revolution in its orbit 

 form the primary clock by which time is measured. The earliest 

 dates that we know definitely are determined from the record that 

 Sirius, the brightest star in the northern sky, rose at the same time 

 as the sun. This enables us to compute approximately the year in 

 which that event occurred, since it can recur only at intervals of 

 1,400 years. 



But the desire to know, which is at the root of all scientific progress, 

 led men not only to measure the apparent motion of the heavenly 

 bodies but to make maps showing the positions of the stars. The stars 

 were observed one at a time, their positions in the heavens were 

 plotted and maps drawn from which the positions of the stars could 

 be identified. It was as a result of the patient work of Tycho Brahe, 

 in the latter half of the sixteenth century, that Kepler was able to 



1 Twentieth James Arthur lecture, given under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion on May 21, 1953, 



205 



