Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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Regarding the illustrations which, according to the implications of the text, accompanied the supplement, the writer was specific. Most of them, he stated, were copies of “drawings taken in the observatory by Herbert Home, Esq., who accompanied the last powerful series of reflectors from London to the Cape. The engraving of the belts of Jupiter is a reduced copy of an imperial folio drawing by Dr. Herschel himself. The segment of the inner ring of Saturn is from a large drawing by Dr. Grant.”

A history of Sir William Herschel’s work and a description of his telescopes took up a column of the Sun, and on top of this came the details—as the Journal printed them—of Sir John’s plans to outdo his father by revolutionary methods and a greater telescope. Sir John, it appeared, was in conference with Sir David Brewster:

After a few minutes’ silent thought, Sir John diffidently inquired whether it would not be possible to effect a transfusion of artificial light through the focal object of vision! Sir David, somewhat startled at the originality of the idea, paused a while, and then hesitatingly referred to the refrangibility of rays and the angle of incidence. Sir John, grown more confident, adduced the example of the Newtonian reflector, in which the refrangibility was corrected by the second speculum and the angle of incidence restored by the third.