Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/427

Rh in the camera; and a small plate of glass ruled with squares was placed at the focus of the telescope and photographed with the sun's image, furnishing a set of reference-lines, which give the means of detecting and allowing for any distortion caused by the enlarging lenses.

The Americans and French, on the other hand, preferred to make the picture of full size, without the intervention of any enlarging lens: as this requires an object-glass with a focal length of thirty or forty feet, which could not be easily pointed at the sun, a plan proposed first, I believe, by M. Laussedat, but also independently by our own Prof. Winlock, was adopted. The telescope is placed horizontal, and the rays are reflected into the object-glass by a plane mirror suitably mounted. The French used mirrors of silvered glass, and took their pictures (about two and a half inches in diameter) by the old daguerreotype process on silvered plates of copper, in order to avoid the risk of collodion-contraction. With the silvered mirror the time of exposure is so short that no clock-work is required. The Americans used unsilvered mirrors, in order to avoid any distorting action of the sun's rays upon the form of the mirror. This, of course, made the light feebler, and the time of exposure longer, so that a clock-work movement of the mirror was needed to keep the image from changing its place on the plate during the exposure, which, however, never exceeded half a second. The American pictures were taken by the ordinary wet process on glass, and were about four inches in diameter. Just in front of the sensitive plate, at a distance of about one-eighth of an inch, was placed a reticle, or a plate of glass ruled in squares, and between this and the collodion-plate hung a fine silver wire suspending a plumb-bob. Thus the finished negative was marked into squares, and also bore the image of the plumb-line, which, of course, indicated precisely the direction of the vertical. The Americans also placed the photographic telescope exactly in line with a meridian instrument, and so determined, with the extremest precision, the direction in which it was pointed. Knowing this, and the time at which any picture was taken, it becomes possible, with the help of the plumb-line image, to determine precisely the orientation of the picture—an advantage possessed by the American pictures alone, and making their value nearly twice as great as otherwise it would have been.

The following figure is a representation of one of the American photographs reduced about one-half. V is the image of Venus, which on the actual plate is about one-seventh of an inch in diameter; a a' is the image of the plumb-line. The centre of the reticle is marked by the little cross, and the word "China," written on the reticle-plate with a diamond—and, of course, copied on the photograph—indicates that it is one of the Peking pictures. Its number in the series is given in the right-hand upper corner. About 90 such pictures were obtained at Peking during the transit, and about 350 at all the eight American stations, the work being much interfered with by unfavorable weather