L66 IOME RE< ENT ASTRONOMICAL EVENTS. 



more complete, though the night of May L8 was, as I have said, gener- 

 ally tine, vol when he tried as a lasl attempl to make a long exposure 

 on the rifts in the southern .Milky Way, the very regions he wished 

 niosi to gel became covered with si slighl degree of fog which spoiled 

 the deiinil ion. 



The other parties on the island all fared better than we; but only 

 one, the branch of the Naval Observatory expedition which was 

 located al Korl de Kock, close to the northern edge of the shadow, 

 had perfeel seeing. There excellenl photographs of the corona and 

 prominences were secured with the 10-fool instrument, under Mr. 

 Peters'.- charge, and spectroscopic results of value were obtained with 

 the grating in the hands of I>r. Humphreys. I>r. Mitchell, al Sawah 

 Loento, was successful in spite of clouds. He secured a fine photo- 

 graph of the "flash spectrum" al third contact, which gives much 

 informal ion in regard to t he sun's atmosphere. The large 1 >utch party 

 had bul very unsatisfactory results, as the cloudiness was almost egual 

 to thai ill Solok. The main portion of the English expedition, occu- 

 pying a small island ju.sl oil' the wesl coasl of Sumatra, bad, though 

 not ;i cloudless, yet a not \evy cloudy sky. and obtained excellent 

 results, of which a shorl account has latch appeared. 



M r. Perrine, of the Lick ( >bservatory, was pretty successful, consid- 

 ering thai In- also observed through a ver$ considerable cloudiness, 

 though not equal to that al Solok. His intramercurial planet appara- 

 lu revealed possibly thirty or forty stars, where it would have shown 

 perhaps a thousand bad the sky been clear; bul with bis direct photo- 

 graphs and with Ins spectroscopic work he was much more successful. 

 In a preliminary report from the Lick Observatory it appears that he 

 has obtained good photographs of the coronal spectrum extending to 

 considerable distances each side of the sun, and taken with slit spectro- 

 scopes with the slil both tangential and radial to the sun's limb. 



In each of these the outer but not the inner corona was shown to 

 have faint Fraun holer absorption lines in the spectrum, giving, in other 

 words, a reflected solar spectrum, thus proving that a portion at least of 

 the coronal light is reflected from particles. His spectrum photo 

 graphs, however, show in addition that the major purl of the coronal 

 light is probably not reflected, and he attributes it to the incandescence 

 of particles heated bv their proximity to the sun. This view, some 

 readers mav recall, would be in contradiction to that tentatively 

 advanced from considerations of the bolometric experiments of the 

 Smithsonian Institution at Wadesboro, North Carolina, in L900, which 

 yielded the inference thai the inner corona was relatively a cool source 

 of light assimilable to the gloM dischai'ge or to the aurora. 1 can not 

 altogether understand why it is thai Mr. Perrine so positively pro 

 nounces the radiation of the inner corona that of an incandescent body 

 rather than that of an electrical discharge or something of a similar 



