1929 ACHIEVEMENTS IN ASTRONOMY
ASTRONOMY IN 1929
by HEBER D. CURTIS
Director, Allegheny Observatory
NEARLY all the research of our great modern observatories is in the form of vast “continuing programs,” planned to last decades instead of months.
So numerous have been minor but none-the-less valuable accretions to the total of astronomical select any particular one as epoch-making. In one field it may be the finding of a brother Milky Way moving over 2,000 miles per second; in another, the investigation of some maverick star, the sending stations of whose atoms seem to follow no regular law of broadcasting their spectra; in another, the proof that hitherto unexplained spectral lines are due merely to some familiar element under strange and unusual conditions of excitation; in still another field, the laborious calculations which will enable us to predict the vagrant paths of some group of minor planets for a millenium to come.
It is sufficient, for the astronomer at least, to know that more than satisfactory progress continues to be made in the long and laborious research programs of the world’s large observatories.
Perhaps most popular interest continues to center in the project for a great reflecting telescope of 200 inches aperture. This must still remain as a hope for the future, as ten years may prove to be too short a time for its completion. Much preliminary research must be done before we shall even be certain that a 200-inch mirror, weighing thirty tons, is a possibility. But encouraging results have already been secured as to the possibility of making such a mirror of fused quartz. The year 1929 has been marked by progress in such preliminary experimentation, and in the details of the design of this giant instrument, which may be expected to display an outer universe at least fourfold and perhaps eightfold as great as at present.
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