These two telescopes, therefore, had their day and ceased to be. Others have followed them. An ingenious telescope was set up by Sir George Airy in order to ascertain if the speed of light were different when passing through water than when passing through air. Or, in other words, if the aberration of light would give the same value as at present if we observed through water. The water telescope, as it was called, is kept on the ground floor of the central octagon of the new observatory. The observations obtained with it were hardly quite satisfactory, but gave on the whole a negative result.
Turning back to the transit room, and leaving it by the south-west door, we come into the little passage which leads at the back of Bradley's transit room into the lower computing room. Just inside this passage, on the left-hand side, there is a little room of a most curious shape, the 'reflex zenith room.' Here is fixed a telescope pointing straight upwards, the eye-piece being fixed by the side of the object-glass. The light from a star—the star Gamma Draconis—which passes exactly over the zenith of Greenwich, enters the object-glass, passes downwards to a basin of mercury, and is reflected upwards from the surface of the mercury to a little prism placed over the centre of the object-glass, from which it is reflected again into the eye-piece. By means of this telescope the distance of the star Gamma Draconis from the zenith could be measured very exactly, and, consequently, the changes in the apparent position of the star due to aberration, parallax, and other causes could be very exactly followed, and the corrections to be applied on account of these causes precisely determined.
This particular telescope was devised by Airy, and the observations with it were continued to the end of his reign. The germ of the idea may be traced back, however, to the time of Flamsteed, who would seem to have occasionally observed Gamma Draconis from the bottom of a deep well; the precise position of the well is not, however, now known. Later, Bradley set up his celebrated 121/2-foot zenith sector, still preserved in the transit room, first at Wanstead and then at Greenwich, for the determination of the amount of aberration. Later, a zenith tube by Troughton, of 25 feet focus, was used by Pond in conjunction with the mural circle for observations of Gamma Draconis in order to determine the zenith point of the latter instrument.
These telescopes for special purposes have passed out of use. Observations with the spectroscope have been suspended for some years. The work of the Astrographic Department will come to an end, in the ordinary course of events, when the programme assigned to Greenwich in the International Scheme is completed.
Within the last few years a new department has come into being at Greenwich—a department which has been steadily worked at many foreign public observatories, but only recently here.
This is the Department of Double-Star Observation. The first double star, Zeta Ursæ Majoris, was discovered 250 years ago. Bradley discovered two exceedingly famous double stars whilst still a young man observing with his uncle at Wanstead—Gamma Virginis and Castor. Bradley made also other discoveries of double stars after his appointment to Greenwich, and Maskelyne succeeded him in the same line, but the great foundation of double-star astronomy was laid by Sir William Herschel.
At first it was supposed that double stars were double only in appearance; one star comparatively near us 'happened' to lie in almost exactly the same direction as another star much further off. It was, indeed, in the very expectation that this would prove to be the case, that the elder Herschel first took up their study. But he was soon convinced that many of the objects were true double stars—members of the same system of which the smaller revolved round the larger—not merely apparently double, one star appearing by chance to be close to another with which it had no connection—but real double stars. The discovery of these has led to the establishment of a new department of astronomy, again scientific rather than utilitarian.
DOUBLE-STAR OBSERVATION WITH THE SOUTH-EAST EQUATORIAL.
(From a photograph by Mr. Edney.)