Double Stars. — Occultations. 299 



which he had printed specimens, using blacklead instead of 

 ink. He also explained the difficulty in finding an ink that 

 would deliver itself from such exceedingly minute cuttings on 

 copper, but his present process is so successful that he has 

 printed the Lord's Prayer from a copper-plate in a space not 

 exceeding one-thousandth of an inch. 



DOUBLE STARS— OCCULTATIONS. 



BY THE EEV. T. W. WEBB, F.E.A.S. 



The unforeseen arrival of the comet, now on its way into the 

 depths of space, occasioned an interruption in our list of double 

 stars, which we shall now resume ; and in preparing work for 

 the lengtheniug evenings, let us indulge the hope that the 

 weather may prove more propitious than has generally been the 

 case during the past season. Some of our readers may perhaps 

 have been expecting an earlier notice of several beautiful pairs; 

 but we have not been desirous of subjecting them needlessly to 

 that neck-twisting which is the inseparable nuisance of the 

 achromatic in amateur hands, and the comfort of viewing them 

 at a lower altitude will be a sufficient explanation of the post- 

 ponement. We bring forward, then, at last, the brilliant gem 

 which has so long adorned the neighbourhood of our Zenith — 

 46. a Lyrce, Wega, or Vega, sometimes less accurately deno- 

 minated Lyra. 43"'4. 135°*2. 1 and 11. Pale sapphire and 

 smalt-blue. Optically double. The great star is a most 

 splendid and lovely object in the telescope ; not dissimilar in 

 the quality of its light to Sirius, though inferior in brilliancy. 

 It seems, however, hardly possible that Wollaston can have 

 done it justice, in assigning to it only one-ninth of the light of 

 Sirius : nine Wegce compacted into one would surely far outvie 

 any star in the firmament. But independently of this estimate, 

 its brightness has been diversely rated. The result of its com- i 

 parison with Arcturus has already been given in the Intellec- 

 tual Obseevee, No. VI. p. 435. The elder Herschel, in 1806, 

 gave, as comparative places in the scale of magnitude, Capella 

 1*25; Lyra 1'30; Procyon 1*40. His son, in his Outlines of 

 Astronomy, ranks Capella, Lyra, and Procyon all of equal 

 magnitude ; but in his Results of Observations at the Cape, 

 in 1847, says — "within my own distinct recollection I always 

 considered Capella inferior to Lyra, whereas it is now decidedly 

 superior/ - ' On the contrary, Laugier, with Arago's apparatus, 

 found the quantity of light from Wega 617, that from Procyon 

 445 ; and Seidel, with SteinheiFs photometer, found for these 



