Abstract
OUR Supplement this week will be read with great interest by specialists in solar research, and also by a considerable number of other readers to whom Dr. Hale's name is closely associated with the Mount Wilson Observatory and the progress of astrophysics. Since 1923 Dr. Hale has been engaged in perfecting an instrument for visual observation of the sun in monochromatic light; and the spectrohelioscope, as he calls it, is now permanently installed at his new solar laboratory at Pasadena. The recent increase of solar activity shown by sunspots, flocculi, and prominences has afforded him ample opportunity for testing the capabilities of the instrument. Its performance appears to have exceeded all expectations, and a rich harvest of results may be anticipated, especially with respect to observations of the sun's upper atmosphere and the hydrogen vortices registered in the light of Ha. These hydrogen vortices, which have been studied almost exclusively since their discovery in 1908 by Dr. Hale and his colleagues at Mount Wilson, are bound up with the problem of the nature of sunspots and their unexplained reversal of magnetic polarity at each spot minimum. The development of the spectrohelioscope, its uses as a powerful instrument of research, and a survey of results obtained to date are reviewed by him in this week's Supplement.
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Solar Surveys. Nature 118, 19 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118019a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118019a0