Page:Philosophical Transactions - Volume 095.djvu/308

276 comers rounded off deeply, but not so much as to bring it to a spheroid. I see it in perfection.

The four satellites that were last night on the preceding, are now on the following side, and are very bright.

I took a measure of the position of the four points of the greatest curvature, and found it 91° 29'. This gives their latitude 45° 44',5. I believe this measure to be pretty accurate. I set first the fixed thread to one of the lines, by keeping the north-preceding and south-following two points in the thread; then adjusted the other thread in the same manner to the south-preceding and north-following points.

May 5, 1805. I directed my 20-feet telescope to Saturn, and, with a power of about 300, saw the planet perfectly well defined, the evening being remarkably clear. The shadow of the ring on the body is quite black. All the other phenomena are very distinct.

The figure of the planet is certainly not spheroidical, like that of Mars and Jupiter. The curvature is less on the equator and on the poles than at the latitude of about 45 degrees. The equatorial diameter is however considerably greater than the polar.

In order to have the testimony of all my instruments, on the subject of the structure of the planet Saturn, I had prepared the 40-feet reflector for observing it in the meridian. I used a magnifying power of 360, and saw its form exactly as I had seen it in the 10 and 20-feet instruments. The planet is flattened at the poles, but the spheroid that would arise from this, flattening is modified by some other cause, which I suppose to be the attraction of the ring. It resembles a parallelogram, one side whereof is the equatorial, the other the polar diameter,