With the older work it is otherwise. So long as Greenwich Park and Blackheath are kept—as it is to be hoped they always will be—sacred from the invasion of the builder; so long as no new railways burrow their tunnels in the neighbourhood of the Observatory, so long the fundamental duties laid upon Flamsteed, 'of Rectifying the Tables of the Motions of the Heavens and the Places of the Fixed Stars,' will be carried out by his successors on Flamsteed Hill.
CHAPTER XII
THE ASTROGRAPHIC DEPARTMENT
The two last departments mentioned, the heliographic and spectroscopic, lie clearly and unmistakably outside the terms of the original warrant of the Observatory, though the progress of science has led naturally and inevitably to their being included in the Greenwich programme. But the Astrographic Department, though it could no more have been conceived in the days of Charles II. than the spectroscopic, does come within the terms of the warrant, and is but an expansion of that work of 'Rectifying the Places of the Fixed Stars,' which formed part of the programme enjoined upon Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, at the first foundation of the Observatory, and which was so diligently carried out by him, the first Greenwich catalogue, containing about 3000 stars, being due to his labours.
'CHART PLATE' OF THE PLEIADES.
(From a photograph taken at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, with an exposure of forty minutes.)
His immediate successors did much less in this field, though Bradley's observations were published, long after his death, as a catalogue of 3222 stars, in some aspects the most important ever issued. Pond, the sixth Astronomer Royal, restored catalogue-making to a prominent place in the Greenwich routine, and his precedent is sedulously followed to-day. But each of these was confined to about 3000 stars. The necessity has long been felt for a much ampler census, and Argelander, at the Bonn Observatory, brought out a catalogue of 324,000 stars north of South declination 2°, a work which has been completed by Schönfeld, who carried the census down to South declination 23°, and by the two great astronomers of Cordoba, South America, Dr. Gould and Dr. Thome, by whom it was extended to the South Pole.