Abstract
THE MELBOURNE OBSERVATORY.—The twelfth Report of the Board of Visitors of this Observatory, addressed to the Governor of Victoria, with the Annual Report of the Government Astronomer, is before us. It presents an outline of the work accomplished between June 20, 1876, and May 22, 1877, and of the work in progress and in prospective. With the great reflector, which is in charge of Mr. Turner, the observation and drawing of Sir John Herschel's figured nebulæ has been continued. A finished drawing of the Horse-shoe Nebula, M. 17, has been made, together with drawings of fifty-seven of the smaller nebulæ. The publication of this work is in progress; out of ninety-three drawings which it is intended to publish, sixty-one are already lithographed; they are representations of the nebulæ on a black ground, and Mr. Ellery states that they render the telescopic appearance of the objects in a most effective and truthful style, and if the lithographic printers succeed in obtaining the requisite number of copies as perfect as the proof copies which were submitted to the Board of Visitors, he considers that “the whole difficulty of economically and satisfactorily reproducing these astronomical drawings will be surmounted.” The descriptive letter-press will be ready by the time the lithography is finished, and it is expected that before the next annual inspection of the Observatory this first instalment of results furnished by the great telescope will have been distributed over the colonies and throughout Europe and America. With the “South equatorial ” Mr. Ellery has been engaged upon a work of no small interest and astronomical value, viz., the re-measurement of the double-stars contained in Sir John Herschel's Cape Catalogue, 1834–38, in which revision he is promised the co-operation of Mr. Todd with the Adelaide refractor. Mr. Ellery further mentions that he hoped to utilise the present opposition of Mars, in connection with northern observatories, for a determination of the solar parallax. The transit-circle observations, which are regarded as the main work of the establishment, are zealously continued. The magnetic and meteorological work is upon the same general plan as hitherto, but the former was likely, at the date of the Report, to suffer some interruption from the necessity of erecting a new magnetic-house.
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Our Astronomical Column . Nature 16, 503–504 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/016503c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/016503c0