Stars 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



of the worlds, in systems belonging to a 

 double star, has a quadruple alternation, 

 in place of that double alternation which we 

 call day and night. There is, first, " double 

 day," when both suns are above the horizon ; 

 next, single day with one sun; then single 

 day with the other sun; and, lastly, true 

 night, when both suns are below the horizon. 

 PROCTOR Expanse of Heaven, p. 228. (L. 

 G. & Co., 1897.) 



3207. STARS INNUMERABLE UN- 

 DER THE TELESCOPE Millions of Stars 

 in the Milky Way. Let us point a telescope 

 towards any point of this vaporous arch 

 [the Milky Way] : suddenly hundreds, thou- 

 sands of stars show themselves in the tele- 

 scopic field like needle-points on the celestial 

 vault. Let us wait for some moments, that 

 our eye may become accustomed to the dark- 

 ness of the background, and the little sparks 

 shine out by thousands. Let us leave the 

 instrument pointed motionless towards the 

 same region, and there slowly passes before 

 our dazzled vision the distant army of stars. 

 In a quarter of an hour we see them appear 

 by thousands and thousands. William Her- 

 schel counted 331,000 in a width of 5 in the 

 constellation Cygnus, so nebulous to the na- 

 ked eye. If we could see the whole of the 

 Milky Way pass before us we should see 

 18 millions of stars. FLAMMARION Popular 

 Astronomy, bk. vi, ch. 10, p. 653. (A.) 



3208. STARS LOST FROM THE 

 HEAVENS Extinguished Suns. There are 

 also cases where stars which had long been 

 known to astronomers have disappeared al- 

 together from view, so that their place 

 knows them no more. It is possible that 

 they may still give out some degree of light 

 and heat, but the most powerful telescope 

 fails to afford any sign of their existence, 

 so that so far as our astronomers are con- 

 cerned, these stars must be regarded as ex- 

 tinguished suns. It is at least certain that 

 they have lost so large a proportion of the 

 light and heat they once possessed that the 

 change must seriously have affected the con- 

 dition of beings living in the planets which 

 doubtless circle around these once brilliant 

 orbs. PROCTOR Expanse of Heaven, p. 197. 

 (L. G. & Co., 1897.) 



3209. STARS NEWLY SEEN SUP- 

 POSED NEWLY CREATED Wandering 

 Nations Surprised ~by a New Heaven. In a 

 fine episode to the Ramayana, the oldest 

 heroic poem of Indian antiquity, the stars 

 in the vicinity of the south pole are declared 

 for a singular reason to have been more 

 recently created than the northern. When 

 Brahminical Indians were emigrating from 

 the northwest to the countries around the 

 Ganges, from the 30th degree of north lati- 

 tude to the lands of the tropics, where they 

 subjected the original inhabitants to their 

 dominion, they saw unknown stars rising 

 above the horizon as they advanced to- 



ward Ceylon. In accordance with ancient 

 practise, they combined these stars into new 

 constellations. A bold fiction represented 

 the later-seen stars as having been subse- 

 quently created by the miraculous power 

 of Visvamitra, who threatened the ancient 

 gods that he would overcome the north- 

 ern hemisphere with his more richly starred 

 southern hemisphere" (A. W. von Schle- 

 gel, in the Zeitschrift fiir die Kunde des 

 Morgenlandes, bd. i, s. 240). While this 

 Indian myth figuratively depicts the as- 

 tonishment excited in wandering nations 

 by the aspect of a new heaven (as the 

 celebrated Spanish poet, Garcilaso de la 

 Vega, says of travelers, " they change at 

 once their country and stars," mudan de 

 pays y de estrellas), we are powerfully re- 

 minded of the impression that must have 

 been excited, even in the rudest nations, 

 when, at a certain part of the earth's sur- 

 face, they observed large, hitherto unseen 

 stars appear in the horizon, as those in the 

 feet of the Centaur, in the Southern Cross, 

 in Eridanus or in Argo, while those with 

 which they had been long familiar at home 

 wholly disappeared. HUMBOLDT Cosmos, 

 vol. iii, p. 137. (H., 1897.) 



32 1O. STARS OBSERVED BY DAY 



Companion Stars Discovered. The idea 

 of observing the stars by daylight with a 

 telescope first occurred to Morin, who, with 

 Gascoigne (about 1638, before Picard and 

 Auzout), combined instruments of measure- 

 ment with the telescope. Morin himself 

 says : " It was not Tycho's great observa- 

 tions in reference to the position of the fixed 

 stars, when, in 1582, twenty-eight years be- 

 fore the invention of the telescope, he was 

 led to compare Venus by day with the sun, 

 and by night with the stars," but " the sim- 

 ple idea that Arcturus and other fixed stars 

 might, like Venus, when once they had been 

 fixed in the field of the telescope before sun- 

 rise, be followed through the heavens after 

 the sun had risen, that led him to a dis- 

 covery which might prove of importance for 

 the determination of longitude at sea." No 

 one was able before him to distinguish the 

 fixed stars in the presence of the sun. Since 

 the employment, by Homer, of great merid- 

 ian telescopes in 1691, observations of the 

 stars by day have been frequent and fruit- 

 ful in results, having been, in some cases, 

 advantageously applied to the measurement 

 of the double stars. Struve states that he 

 has determined the smallest distances of ex- 

 tremely faint stars in the Dorpat refractor, 

 with a power of only 320, in so bright a 

 crepuscular light that he could read with 

 ease at midnight. The polar star has a 

 companion of the ninth magnitude, which 

 is situated at only 18" distance; it was seen 

 by day in the Dorpat refracting telescope 

 by Struve and Wrangel, and was in like 

 manner observed on one occasion by Encke 

 and Argelander. HUMBOLDT Cosmos, vol. 

 iii, p. 66. (H., 1897.) 



