ABSTRACT OF PROCEEDINGS. Xlll. 



Northern Hemisphere has failed to see what is by pre-eminence 

 called "the North Star," while hardly one in ten thousand here 

 has ever seen the corresponding South Star. No wonder: it is 

 barely visible to unassisted vision. Dr. Rose by then exhibited a 

 diagram (a copy of which is shown herewith) which showed how 

 the star might readily be found with any ordinary binocular glass. 

 Starting with the best known southern constellation, the Southern 

 Cross, you follow the line of its longer axis till on the opposite 

 side of the pole you encounter Achernar, a brilliant first magnitude 

 star. If you bisect this line between the uppermost star of the 

 Gross and Achernar, you will be very near the South Pole, about 

 34° above the horizon in the latitude of Sydney. Now, starting 

 from Achernar, and keeping throughout on' the line towards the 

 Cross, you meet the bright star, the brightest in the neighbourhood, 

 ft Hydri. And now, heading directly towards the Cross, you 

 encounter the little triple asterism y 3 , thence an unnamed star, 

 and then r Octantis. The next star along this line is the pole 

 star, o- Octantis, which you immediately recognise from two stars 

 near it, B and omicron Octantis, making what looks like the 

 acute bending of a "hoe." The pole star and B are nearly equi- 

 distant from the pole, and in 1922 will be exactly so. 



The Circumpolar Map exhibited, which for a special reason, was 

 confined to the area within two degrees of the pole showed about 

 180 stars. The ordinary star atlases, including that of Sydney 

 Observatory, only show two or three stars within that area. But 

 this limited region had recently occupied the observation and 

 research of two great observatories — that of the Royal Observatory 

 at the Cape, and that of the Columbia Observatory of the United 

 States. The Cape Observatory catalogues 917 stars within the 

 area, and the Columbia Observatory (Washington) 829. The 

 map selects 180 of these, those within the range of ordinary tele- 

 scopes. The map itself is a reproduction by Mr. E. R. Morris of 

 an exquisite photograph by the Union Observatory of South Africa. 



A unique feature of the Cape and Washington Catalogues is 

 that the stars are numbered in a new, and much more accurate 



Kk— December 5, 1917. 



