Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [143]
There were a great many papers on instrumental design, one of the more interesting being by Hale. In January 1897 he suggested that both refracting and reflecting telescopes were needed, but noted that there was a clear movement toward reflectors, especially equatorial coude telescopes. In a historical memoir, Hale mentions that the 40-inch lens was available to the Yerkes Observatory only because a previous plan to build a large refractor near Pasadena, California, had fallen through. What, I wonder, would the history of astronomy have been like if the plan had succeeded? Curiously enough, Pasadena seems to have made an offer to the University of Chicago to have the Yerkes Observatory situated there. It would have been a long commute for 1897.
AT THE END of the nineteenth century, solar system studies displayed the same mixture of future promise and current confusion that the stellar work did. One of the most notable papers of the period, by Henry Norris Russell, is called “The Atmosphere of Venus.” It is a discussion of the extension of the cusps of the crescent Venus, based in part on the author’s observations with the 5-inch finder telescope of the “great equatorial” of the Halsted Observatory at Princeton. Perhaps the young Russell was not yet considered fully reliable operating larger telescopes at Princeton. The essence of the analysis is correct by present standards. Russell concluded that refraction of sunlight was not responsible for the extension of the cusps, and that the cause was to be found in the scattering of sunlight: “… the atmosphere of Venus, like our own, contains suspended particles of dust or fog of some sort, and … what we see is the upper part of this hazy atmosphere, illuminated by rays that have passed close to the planet’s surface.” He later says that the apparent surface may be a dense cloud layer. The height of the haze is calculated as about 1 kilometer above what we would now call the main cloud deck, a number that is just consistent with limb photography by the Mariner 10 spacecraft. Russell thought, from the work of others, that there was some spectroscopic evidence for water vapor and oxygen in a thin Venus atmosphere. But the essence of his argument has stood the test of time remarkably well.
William H. Pickering’s discovery of Phoebe, the outermost satellite of Saturn, was announced; and Andrew E. Douglass of the Lowell Observatory published observations that led him to conclude that Jupiter 3 rotates about one hour slower than its period of revolution, a conclusion incorrect by one hour.
Others who estimated periods of rotation were not quite so successful. For example, there was a Leo Brenner who observed from the Manora Observatory in a place called Lussinpiccolo. Brenner severely criticized Percival Lowell’s estimate of the rotation period of Venus. Brenner himself compared two drawings of Venus in white light made by two different people four years apart—from which he deduced a rotation period of 23 hours, 57 minutes and 36.37728 seconds, which he said agreed well with the mean of his own “most reliable” drawings. Considering this, Brenner found it incomprehensible that there could still be partisans of a 224.7-day rotation period and concluded that “an inexperienced observer, an unsuitable telescope, an unhappily chosen eyepiece, a very small diameter of the planet, observed with an insufficient power, and a low declination, all together explained Mr. Lowell’s peculiar drawings.” The truth, of course, lies not between the extremes of Lowell and Brenner, but rather at the other end of the scale, with a minus sign, a retrograde period of 243 days.
In another communication Herr Brenner begins: “Gentlemen: I have the honor to inform you that Mrs. Manora has discovered a new division in the Saturnian ring system”—from which we discover that there is a Mrs. Manora at the Manora Observatory in Lussinpiccolo and that she performs observations along with Herr Brenner.