346 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. VIII. No. 194. 



away from the island ; the seizure of the 

 plates by the customs officials on arrival at 

 New York, and, after their rescue, the sub- 

 sequent delay for want of time to develop 

 the plates, until May of next year, when 

 thej- had undergone decomposition, so that 

 the results were not as good as might have 

 been expected. 



The closing of the year 1888 and the 

 opening of 1889 brought one of the most 

 important eclipses that had yet occurred 

 from a photographic standpoint. Certainly 

 no previous eclipse, nor any since, so far 

 as that is concerned, was photographed 

 by so many different persons, and with such 

 a varied assortment of cameras, telescopes, 

 etc. The path of this eclipse lay across 

 Nevada and California, and every photog- 

 rapher, amateur or professional, near the 

 line of totality took part in the work. The 

 amateur photographers of San Francisco 

 and Oakland banded together under the 

 leadership of Mr. Charles Burckhalter and 

 photographed the eclipse in a systematic 

 manner, the result being a most excellent 

 collection of negatives of the corona. In 

 some of these pictures the coronal streamers 

 were carried to a far greater extent than 

 at any previous eclipse ; especially was this 

 so in the photographs made by two of the 

 amateur photographers, Messrs. Lowden 

 and Ireland. At this eclipse the lot fell to 

 the writer to make the photographs for the 

 Lick Observatorj'. But at this time the 

 Observatory had no instruments suitable for 

 the work. To secure as large an image as 

 possible with the poor equipment at hand, a 

 3^-inch visual objective by Alvan Clark 

 was selected. This lens, after being re- 

 duced to If inch in diameter and mounted 

 in an oblong box fastened to a polar axis 

 driven by the clockwork belonging to the 12- 

 inch equatorial, was found to give a fairly 

 good photographic image. With this and 

 two small photographic cameras, nine nega- 

 tives of the corona were secured. The best 



of these was one made with the Clark 

 visual objective. By extreme care in de- 

 velopment, this negative not only showed 

 the exquisite polar systems of streamers 

 and the details of the corona close to the 

 moon, but also carried the coronal exten- 

 sions a great distance along the ecliptic. 

 This was by far the most successful eclipse 

 photographically of any that had yet been 

 observed, and forever set aside as worthless 

 the crude and wholly unreliable free-hand 

 sketches and drawings previously depended 

 upon. 



The eclipse of December 21, 1889, was suc- 

 cessfully photographed, among others, by 

 Mr. Burnhamand Professor Schaeberle, com- 

 prising the Lick Observatory eclipse expedi- 

 tion which was sent to Cayenne. It was at 

 this eclipse that Father Perry lost his life 

 through the trying climatic conditions. 

 With the sickness of death upon him, this 

 brave man, fearless in his duty, stood by his 

 cameras and carefully carried out his pro- 

 gram during the eclipse, only to collapse at 

 its close and die a few days later on the 

 vessel that was carrying him away from the 

 fateful spot. 



The eclipse of 1893 was successfully pho- 

 tographed in Brazil, Africa and Chile. Pro- 

 fessor Schaeberle made arrangements for the 

 photography of the corona on a large scale, 

 and with his apparatus at Mina Bronces, 

 Chile, secured a fine series of photographs 

 with a photo-heliograph of iO-feet focus, 

 which he mounted on a hill sloping towards 

 the sun. The image was formed by a sta- 

 tionary lens five inches in diameter upon a 

 large sensitive plate which was moved by 

 clockwork to counteract the sun's motion 

 during the few minutes of the eclipse. In 

 these pictures the image of the sun was on 

 such a large scale that the coronal details 

 could be very accurately studied. Upon 

 these plates Professor Schaeberle found a 

 hazy ill-defined spot at forty minutes' dis- 

 tance from the sun's center. This he sub- 



