Archive for the 'Astronomy' Category

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 [...]

Is There Life on Mars 1925

WHY ARE WE KEEN ABOUT MARS? WHY SHOULD MARS ATTRACT so much interest as it does? “asks Dr. Robert G. Aitken, associate director of the Lick Observatory, in a recent leaflet issued by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (San Francisco). It is by no means the largest of the planets; on the contrary, it [...]

Planet Discoveries 1930

STILL ANOTHER PLANET? ANOTHER NEW TRANS-NEPTUAN PLANET has been discovered by astronomers of the Dominion Observatory at Ottawa, according to dispatches to Science Service, given in its Daily Science News Bulletin (Washington). We read: “This tenth planet of the solar system, if further observations bear out the planetary nature tentatively assigned to it, will make [...]

Pons-Winnecke comet visit 1927

OUR VISITING COMET CLOSER TO THE EARTH than any comet except one is known to have come before, the Pons-Winnecke comet was only 3,500,000 miles away from us on June 27, about fourteen and a half times as far as the moon, and far closer than any other astronomical body ordinarily comes. But despite this [...]

Knowledge of the Planet Jupiter 1927

THE GIANT OF THE PLANETS THE LATEST ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES and opinions regarding the great planet Jupiter are briefly gathered in a leaflet issued by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (San Francisco). In it, E. C. Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona, tells us that Jupiter’s claim on our interest is not so much [...]

World’s Largest Telescope 1925

TO REVEAL EIGHTY MILLION MORE STARS THE LARGEST TELESCOPE IN THE WORLD is soon to be in operation at Seattle, Washington, according to a news item in the New York Herald Tribune. It will be a reflector, with a mirror 120 inches in diameter. The telescope itself and the great observatory now being erected to [...]