Abstract
PERHAPS it may interest some of your readers to know that the quartz fibres of Prof. Boys affords an excellent material for providing the eye-lens of telescopes, and specially the instruments used in combination with reflecting galvanometers and electrometers, with threads required for their adjustment on the divisions of the scale. I thought at first that as the fibres appear, when examined with the microscope, to be semi-transparent and have a silver-grey colour, they would, when seen behind the ocular lens, not present themselves as distinct and clear lines, but as a matter of fact, when they were put at the proper distance, they showed an intense black colour, even darker than the divisions made with ink on the scale on which the instruments were focused. I used threads of 20 microns diameters, and they can be fixed on the diaphragm without much difficulty by means of a mixture of resin and mastic applied with a heated wire, and this mixture answers better than brittle shellac. It is obvious that the threads, when laid down in the diaphragm, are at once stretched, and remain in good condition, as they are not affected in any appreciable degree by the influence of heat and atmospheric moisture.
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BLEEKRODE, L. On the Use of Quartz Fibres in Telescopes. Nature 50, 174 (1894). https://doi.org/10.1038/050174a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/050174a0
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