These last three catalogues embrace stars of all magnitudes down to the 9th or 10th; but certain astronomers had endeavoured to go much lower, and to make charts of limited portions of the sky down to even the 14th magnitude.
From the very earliest days that men observed the stars, they could not help noticing that 'one star differeth from another star in glory,' and consequently they divided them into six classes, according to their brightness—classes which are commonly spoken of now as magnitudes. The ordinary 6th magnitude star is one which can be clearly seen by average sight on a good night, and it gives us about one-hundredth the light of an average 1st magnitude star. Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars, is called a 1st magnitude star, but is really some six or seven times as bright as the average. It would take, therefore, more than two and a half million stars of the 14th magnitude to give as much light as Sirius.
It is evident that so searching a census as to embrace stars of the 14th magnitude would involve a most gigantic chart. But the work went on in more than one Observatory for a considerable time, until at last the observers entered on to the region of the Milky Way. Here the numbers of the stars presented to them were so great as to baffle all ordinary means of observation. What could be done?
Just at this time immense interest was caused in the astronomical world by the appearance of the great comet of 1882. It was watched and observed and sketched by countless admirers, but more important still, it was photographed, and some of its photographs, taken at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, showed not only the comet with marvellous beauty of detail, but also thousands of stars, and the success of these photographs suggested to her Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape, Dr. Gill, that in photography we possessed the means for making a complete sky census even to the 14th magnitude.
The project was thought over in all its bearings, and in 1887 a great conference of astronomers at Paris resolved upon an international scheme for photographing the entire heavens. The work was to be divided between eighteen Observatories of different nationalities. It was to result in a photographic chart extending to the 14th magnitude, and probably embracing some forty million stars, and a catalogue made from measures of the photographs down to the 11th magnitude, which would probably include between two and three million stars.
THE CONTROL PENDULUM AND THE BASE OF THE THOMPSON TELESCOPE.
The eighteen Observatories all undertook to use instruments of the same capacity. This was to be a photographic refractor, with an object-glass of 13 inches aperture and 11 feet focus. At Greenwich this telescope is mounted equatorially—that is, so as to follow the stars in their courses—and is mounted on the top of the pier that once supported Halley's quadrant. The telescope is driven by a most efficient clock, whose motive power is a heavy weight. The rate of the weight in falling is regulated by an ingenious governor, which brings its speed very nearly indeed to that of the star, and any little irregularities in its motion are corrected by the following device. A seconds pendulum is mounted in a glass case on the wall of the Observatory, and a needle at the lower end of the pendulum passes at each swing through a globule of mercury. On one of the wheels of the clock are arranged a number of little brass points, at such intervals apart that the wheel, when going at the proper rate, takes exactly one second to move through the distance between any pair. A little spring is arranged above the wheel, so that these points touch it as they pass. If this occurs exactly as the pendulum point passes through the mercury nothing happens, but if the clock is ever so little late or early, the electric current from the pendulum brings into action a second wheel, which accelerates or retards the driving of the clock, as the case may be. The total motion, therefore, is most beautifully even.