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National Geographic : 1919 Aug
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EXPLORING THE GLORIES OF THE FIRMAMENT Photograph from Mount Wilson Observatory THE NEBULA IN COMA BERENCIS A little poleward from a line drawn between Regulus and Arcturus is the constellation Coma Berencis (see the chart on page 170). The nebula shown here is a part of it, and is thought to be so far away that a light ray leaving it today will not arrive on the earth for thirty thousand years. It is the fastest-moving object yet discovered in the heavens. Travel ing at the speed it is going in its headlong flight through space, we could go around the earth in one minute. chart of the whole sky is being prepared by the observatories of the world. This chart requires the taking of 22,000 photo graphs, each covering four square de grees of sky (see page 178). MAPPING A UNIVERSE Each photograph has in it several stars whose positions have been fixed by direct observation. From them the position of every other star shown on the plate can be fixed by measuring, with a machine employing high-power microscopes, their exact places in the photograph. The completion of this work will record the position of at least eight million stars. When we consider the solar system with its great sun, its eight planets and their twenty-seven moons, and its eight hundred asteroids-as occupying an area whose diameter is nearly six billion miles (some six million times as far as from New York to Chicago), it is amazing to think that there may be millions of other solar systems as large or larger than our own, comparatively close to us as star distances go, though so remote that their planets could not be seen by the astrono mers of the earth, even with telescopes as much more powerful than the biggest ones now in use are stronger than the naked eye. THlE ACME OF ISOLATION So careful an astronomer as Agnes M. Clerke tells us that a skiff in a vast, unfurrowed ocean could not be more ut terly alone than is our solar system in its little corner of the universe. She continues: "Yet the sun is no isolated body. To each individual of the unnumbered stars strewing the firmament, down to the faintest speck of light, . . . it stands in some kind of relationship. Together they master its destiny and control its movements. Independent so far as its domestic affairs are concerned, it is 169
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