SOMi: NOTES ON JUPITEE DUEINa HIS OPPOSITION OF 1876. 91 



remarks, for perhaps some may thiuk I may in my draw- 

 ings have been inclined somewhat to exaggerate the colours — 

 a fault I have most carefully tried to avoid. On the 2nd June, 

 1872, he says, using a 24-inch reflector — " I acknowledge that I 

 have been hitherto inclined to think that there might be some 

 exaggeration in the coloured views of the planet ; but this pro- 

 "j^erty of the disk on the occasion I speak of was so unmistakable 

 that my scepticism is at last beginning to yield. I have attempted 

 in the accompanying drawing to represent the colours as faith- 

 fully as I can, and to convey something like a general notion of 

 the distribution and intensity of the various lights and shades 

 scattered over the planet, but to give anything like a faithful 

 outline of the individual phenomena is far more than I can pre- 

 tend to." These words of Lassell have come home forcibly to 

 myself, again and again, when in moments of magnificent defini- 

 tion, such a wealth of detail has been presented to my sight that 

 my pencil has lain idly by, and I have been content to gaze in 

 almost open-mouthed wonder. 



After 1872 the planet appears to have for some time shown no 

 remarkable amount of colour — at least I have not been able to 

 put my hand upon any observation in which the equatorial belt 

 has been especially noticed as presenting anything pa,rticularly 

 unusual in this respect. And Mr. Browning says, in June, 1873 — 

 " The colour of the equatorial belt of Jupiter was fading during 

 the last weeks of the previous opposition ; during the present 

 opposition the colour has been scarcely, if at all, perceptible." 

 In the same year Dr. Lohse, as you will have noticed in the cir- 

 cular, made an appeal to astronomers generally in the Northern 

 hemisphere, that drawings should be systematically taken of the 

 planet. One of the results of this request, and the only one that 

 I am able to show you, was a series of drawings made by Dr. 

 Copeland, using the great Lord Hosse telescope of 6-feet aperture. 

 A lithographic reproduction of these is now on the table. I believe 

 these drawings were thought a great deal of at the time, and they 

 were specially mentioned at a meeting of the Eoyal Astronomical 

 Society, as showing an immense amount of detail ; but I may 

 mention that I have repeatedly observed more detail in the 

 10^-inch reflector on an ordinary night than is shown in any one 

 of them. You will observe moreover, that there is a reddish 

 tinge in all of them, pervading the whole of the disk. This I 

 cannot fancy really belongs to the planet, but is communicated 

 by the metallic reflector ; for it is a known fact that these old 

 metallic reflectors gave all objects a ruddy hue, and it is believed 

 that this explains the appearance of so many red stars in the 

 elder Herschel's catalogue. 



The most noticeable feature in these drawings of Lord Rosse 

 is the great loss of colour sustained by the equatorial belt. This 



