Abstract
HARVARD COLLEGE OBSERVATORY.—The most interesting item in the forty-second Annual Report of the Director of the Harvard College Observatory is the account of the threefod accession to its resources which it has received during the past year. This consisted of the funds provided by Mrs. Henry Draper for carrying on the photographic study of stellar spectra as a memorial to her late husband; the fund left by the late Uriah A. Boyden for the establishment of a mountain Observatory; and the large bequest of the late Robert Treat Paine. Prof. Pickering points out, however, that the Observatory still stands in need of further endowment, as its new resources are necessarily largely absorbed in those new lines of research for which they were specially designed, and considerable improvements are required in the principal building; and he adds that it is probable that there has never been a time in the history of the institution when so large a return could be obtained from a given expenditure as at present. The most striking results obtained during the year have been those secured by the use of the Henry Draper Memorial Fund in the photographic study of stellar spectra, and which have been already referred to in these columns. Under the Boyden Fund several instruments have been devised and constructed for the automatic registration of the meteorological conditions and general fitness for observing of sites for Observatories, and these have been carefully tested at various elevated stations. The usual observations have also been kept up, including the observation with the meridian photometer of the magnitudes of stars in zones at intervals of 5° in the region covered by the Southern D.M. This work was about half finished, and would, it was expected, be entirely completed within the present year. The east equatorial had been used in the observation of eclipses of Jupiter's satellites and of comparison-stars for variables. A wedge photometer, arranged in a somewhat modified manner, is employed with this telescope, and is to be used in the investigation of the phases of asteroids and in the observation of zones of D.M. stars. The meridian circle is to be engaged in the observation of one of the zones required in the proposed revision of the Southern D.M.
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Our Astronomical Column . Nature 37, 596–597 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/037596a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/037596a0