Abstract
THE TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE OF AUGUST 29, 1886.—Part 5 of vol. xviii. of the Annals of the Harvard College Observatory, contains an account by Mr. W. H. Pickering of his expedition to Grenada in 1886 in order to observe the total eclipse of August 29; and some points in his report have recently been commented on by Mr. W. H. Wesley (Observatory, October 1888) and Mr. Ranyard (Knowledge, November 1888). Mr. Pickering's original plan of work had been a very wide one, and he took out a great variety of instruments with him, but no assistants besides his wife and a lady friend. It was very late in August before he arrived at Grenada, and this circumstance and the frequent obscuration of the sun before totality on o the day of the eclipse caused several items of his programme to result in complete failure. The long focus photpheliograph and the actinometer under Mr. Pickering's own superintendence gave no results, but Mrs. Pickering secured three photographs with a couple of short-focus cameras, and Mr. Glean one with a telescope of 4 feet focus. One of Mrs. Pickering's photographs supplies some very curious features in the shape of some very faint extensions of the corona on the western side of the sun. One of these is a prolongation of a bright synclinal mass, and rises in a narrow jet to a height of 48′ from the limb, and then divides into three parts, two-falling back towards the sun right and left of the centre ray, which attains a total height of 60′, then to bend over in a precisely similar fashion. Another extension further to the north rises to about the same height, 60′, and then curves downward again.
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Our Astronomical Column . Nature 39, 61 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/039061a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/039061a0