Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/34

24 corona fairly on to the glass. Mr. Brothers, of Manchester, however, showed how this difficulty was to be surmounted. He discarded the telescope and employed the ordinary photographic camera. The results were most satisfactory. The eclipsed sun was indeed partially hidden by clouds during all but the last few seconds of totality; but for eight seconds the camera was fairly at work; and the result was, "the corona as it had never been seen on glass before."



During the late eclipse, Mr. Brothers's plan was adopted at several stations, and most successfully, by all the photographing parties whose accounts have yet reached Europe. For many weeks, however, these photographs will not be available for examination. The great point which we know already respecting them is this: that they show an extensive corona, with persistent rifts—those taken at the beginning of totality differing from those taken at the end only as respects parts of the corona very far from the sun. All those doubts, which had been based on the circumstance that Mr. Brothers's best photograph was taken nearly at the close of totality, are therefore removed by the photographs taken on the present occasion.

But, the corona was so favorably seen even with the naked eye, during the recent eclipse, as to dispose of all the doubts formerly entertained. In an interesting letter in the Daily News, an eye-witness at Bekul, describing Mr. Lockyer's observations, says that so soon as the totality began the corona appeared, rigid in the heavens, like a magnificent decoration, suggesting by its fixity the idea of perfect rest