Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/305

Rh the Sun's edge, and a little black spot appears to join them; the second when the spot vanishes and the disc of the planet touches the bright rim of the Sun. Each chronometer was at a different hour, minutes and second. Our task was to take on each the exact interval between the two calls. Our telescope was too small for complete accuracy, but the results of our observations showed that we all agreed on the length of the interval between the calls to half a second. As the planet slowly moved across the sky from 1.30 p.m. to about five, it looked like a black bullet.

Presently there came a telegram from Palmer,—clouds, no observation; failure; and the same to a great extent in Otago. Soon afterwards he and Darwin came to Hokitika. He was full of regret: "Months of the stiffest work by way of preparation thrown away." We had drawn up as good a report as we could of what we had done, which he was glad to have, but it was of comparatively little value as our glass was so small.

Soon after this, I received, as an Easter offering, a hundred guineas, and, sending to London, obtained a good, equatorially mounted telescope, with an object glass of four and a half inch diameter, with circles, its focal length five feet. In my garden at Timaru I erected it, with an Observatory shed. It has been a great source of pleasure to me and to many others. This Southern Hemisphere is richer in stars of first magnitude than the Northern, and in its constellations, though it lacks the Great Bear, and has no Polar star.

The eight years' interval over, there came the chance again of seeing the Transit of Venus, the last for the next hundred years. Major Tupman, a well-known astronomer, with Lieutenant Coke, came out for it,