A Short History of Astronomy, Arthur Berry [large screen ebook reader .TXT] 📗

VIII., § 160). The Greenwich Observatory was, however, on a very different scale from the magnificent sister institution. The King had, it is true, provided Flamsteed with a building and a very small salary, but furnished him neither with instruments nor with an assistant. A few instruments he possessed already, a few more were given to him by rich friends, and he gradually made at his own expense some further instrumental additions of importance. Some years after his appointment the Government provided him with “a silly, surly labourer” to help him with some of the rough work, but he was compelled to provide more skilled assistance out of his own pocket, and this necessity in turn compelled him to devote some part of his valuable time to taking pupils.

198. Flamsteed’s great work was the construction of a more accurate and more extensive star catalogue than any that existed; he also made a number of observations of the moon, of the sun, and to a less extent of other bodies. Like Tycho, the author of the last great star catalogue (chapter V., § 107), he found problems continually presenting themselves in the course of his work which had to be solved before his main object could be accomplished, and we accordingly owe to him the invention of several improvements in practical astronomy, the best known being his method of finding the position of the first point of Aries (chapter II., § 42), one of the fundamental points with reference to which all positions on the celestial sphere are defined. He was the first astronomer to use a clock systematically for the determination of one of the two fundamental quantities (the right ascension) necessary to fix the position of a star, a method which was first suggested and to some extent used by Picard (chapter VIII., § 157), and, as soon as he could get the necessary instruments, he regularly used the telescopic sights of Gascoigne and Auzout (chapter VIII., § 155), instead of making naked-eye observations. Thus while Hevel (chapter VIII., § 153) was the last and most accurate observer of the old school, employing methods not differing essentially from those which had been in use for centuries, Flamsteed belongs to the new school, and his methods differ rather in detail than in principle from those now in vogue for similar work at Greenwich, Paris, or Washington. This adoption of new methods, together with the most scrupulous care in details, rendered Flamsteed’s observations considerably more accurate than any made in his time or earlier, the first definite advance afterwards being made by Bradley (§ 218).

Flamsteed compared favourably with many observers by not merely taking and recording observations, but by performing also the tedious process known as reduction (§ 218), whereby the results of the observation are put into a form suitable for use by other astronomers; this process is usually performed in modern observatories by assistants, but in Flamsteed’s case had to be done almost exclusively by the astronomer himself. From this and other causes he was extremely slow in publishing observations; we have already alluded (chapter IX., § 192) to the difficulty which Newton had in extracting lunar observations from him, and after a time a feeling that the object for which the Observatory had been founded was not being fulfilled became pretty general among astronomers. Flamsteed always suffered from bad health as well as from the pecuniary and other difficulties which have been referred to; moreover he was much more anxious that his observations should be kept back till they were as accurate as possible, than that they should be published in a less perfect form and used for the researches which he once called “Mr. Newton’s crotchets”; consequently he took remonstrances about the delay in the publication of his observations in bad part. Some painful quarrels occurred between Flamsteed on the one hand and Newton and Halley on the other. The last straw was the unauthorised publication in 1712, under the editorship of Halley, of a volume of Flamsteed’s observations, a proceeding to which Flamsteed not unnaturally replied by calling Halley a “malicious thief.” Three years later he succeeded in getting hold of all the unsold copies and in destroying them, but fortunately he was also stimulated to prepare for publication an authentic edition. The Historia Coelestis Britannica, as he called the book, contained an immense series of observations made both before and during his career at Greenwich, but the most important and permanently valuable part was a catalogue of the places of nearly 3,000 stars.112

Flamsteed himself only lived just long enough to finish the second of the three volumes; the third was edited by his assistants Abraham Sharp (1651-1742) and Joseph Crosthwait; and the whole was published in 1725. Four years later still appeared his valuable Star-Atlas, which long remained in common use.

The catalogue was not only three times as extensive as Tycho’s, which it virtually succeeded, but was also very much more accurate. It has been estimated113 that, whereas Tycho’s determinations of the positions of the stars were on the average about 1′ in error, the corresponding errors in Flamsteed’s case were about 10″. This quantity is the apparent diameter of a shilling seen from a distance of about 500 yards; so that if two marks were made at opposite points on the edge of the coin, and it were placed at a distance of 500 yards, the two marks might be taken to represent the true direction of an average star and its direction as given in Flamsteed’s catalogue. In some cases of course the error might be much greater and in others considerably less.

Flamsteed contributed to astronomy no ideas of first-rate importance; he had not the ingenuity of Picard and of Roemer in devising instrumental improvements, and he took little interest in the theoretical work of Newton;114 but by unflagging industry and scrupulous care he succeeded in bequeathing to his successors an immense treasure of observations, executed with all the accuracy that his instrumental means permitted.

199. Flamsteed was succeeded as Astronomer Royal by Edmund Halley, whom we have already met with (chapter IX., § 176) as Newton’s friend and helper.

Born in 1656, ten years after Flamsteed, he studied astronomy in his schooldays, and published a paper on the orbits of the planets as early as 1676. In the same year he set off for St. Helena (in latitude 16° S.) in order to make observations of stars which were too near the south pole to be visible in Europe. The climate turned out to be disappointing, and he was only able after his return to publish (1678) a catalogue of the places of 341 southern stars, which constituted, however, an important addition to precise knowledge of the stars. The catalogue was also remarkable as being the first based on telescopic observation, though the observations do not seem to have been taken with all the accuracy which his instruments rendered attainable. During his stay at St. Helena he also took a number of pendulum observations which confirmed the results obtained a few years before by Richer at Cayenne (chapter VIII., § 161), and also observed a transit of Mercury across the sun, which occurred in November 1677.

After his return to England he took an active part in current scientific questions, particularly in those connected with astronomy, and made several small contributions to the subject. In 1684, as we have seen, he first came effectively into contact with Newton, and spent a good part of the next few years in helping him with the Principia.

200. Of his numerous contributions to astronomy, which touched almost every branch of the subject, his work on comets is the best known and probably the most important. He observed the comets of 1680 and 1682; he worked out the paths both of these and of a number of other recorded comets in accordance with Newton’s principles, and contributed a good deal of the material contained in the sections of the Principia dealing with comets, particularly in the later editions. In 1705 he published a Synopsis of Cometary Astronomy in which no less than 24 cometary orbits were calculated. Struck by the resemblance between the paths described by the comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682, and by the approximate equality in the intervals between their respective appearances and that of a fourth comet seen in 1456, he was shrewd enough to conjecture that the three later comets, if not all four, were really different appearances of the same comet, which revolved round the sun in an elongated ellipse in a period of about 75 or 76 years. He explained the difference between the 76 years which separate the appearances of the comet in 1531 and 1607, and the slightly shorter period which elapsed between 1607 and 1682, as probably due to the perturbations caused by planets near which the comet had passed; and finally predicted the probable reappearance of the same comet (which now deservedly bears his name) about 76 years after its last appearance, i.e. about 1758, though he was again aware that planetary perturbation might alter the time of its appearance; and the actual appearance of the comet about the predicted time (chapter XI., § 231) marked an important era in the progress of our knowledge of these extremely troublesome and erratic bodies.

201. In 1693 Halley read before the Royal Society a paper in which he called attention to the difficulty of reconciling certain ancient eclipses with the known motion of the moon, and referred to the possibility of some slight increase in the moon’s average rate of motion round the earth.

This irregularity, now known as the secular acceleration of the moon’s mean motion, was subsequently more definitely established as a fact of observation; and the difficulties met with in explaining it as a result of gravitation have rendered it one of the most interesting of the moon’s numerous irregularities (cf. chapter XI., § 240, and chapter XIII., § 287).

202. Halley also rendered good service to astronomy by calling attention to the importance of the expected transits of Venus across the sun in 1761 and 1769 as a means of ascertaining the distance of the sun. The method had been suggested rather vaguely by Kepler, and more definitely by James Gregory in his Optics published in 1663. The idea was first suggested to Halley by his observation of the transit of Mercury in 1677. In three papers published by the Royal Society he spoke warmly of the advantages of the method, and discussed in some detail the places and means most suitable for observing the transit of 1761. He pointed out that the desired result could be deduced from a comparison of the durations of the transit of Venus, as seen from different stations on the earth, i.e. of the intervals between the first appearance of Venus on the sun’s disc and the final disappearance, as seen at two or more different stations. He estimated, moreover, that this interval of time, which would be several hours in length, could be measured with an error of only about two seconds, and that in consequence the method might be relied upon to give the distance of the sun to within about 1∕500 part of its true value. As the current estimates of the sun’s distance differed among one another by 20 or 30 per cent., the new method, expounded with Halley’s customary lucidity and enthusiasm, not unnaturally stimulated astronomers to take great trouble to carry