Abstract
IN a communication, dated October 17, from the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, an account is given of experiments made by Dr. Charles G. Abbot, secretary of the Institution and Mr. W. H. Hoover, of the Smithsonian staff, at the Mount Wilson Observatory of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, on the total energy radiated by distant stars in narrow wave-length bands. For the measurement of electric current they used a galvanometer which was twenty times as sensitive as any instrument of this sort used in the past. A magnetic shield for this very sensitive galvanometer was made for the Institution by the late Dr. Elihu Thomson, of the General Electric Company, one of the world's foremost inventors of electrical devices. The galvanometer itself was made at the Institution and will detect a current variation of 1/1013 of an ampere.
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Precision Methods of Measuring Stellar Radiation. Nature 142, 1007–1008 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/1421007a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1421007a0