Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 57.djvu/398

388 the southern, Gould's 'Uranometria Argentina.' A zone from the equator to 30° south declination is common to both; for this zone I use Gould. The number of each class in the entire sky, north and south of the celestial equator, is as follows:

It would seem from this that the number of lucid stars in the southern celestial hemisphere is 315 greater than in the northern. But this arises wholly from a seemingly greater number of stars of magnitude 6. In the zone 0° to 30° S., Pickering has 214 stars of this class fewer than Gould. Hence it is not likely that there is any really greater richness of the southern sky.

The total number of lucid stars is thus found to be 5,333. But it is not likely that stars of magnitudes 6.1 and 6.2 should be included in this class, though this is done in the above table. From a careful study and comparison of the same data from Pickering and Gould, Schiaparelli enumerated the stars to magnitude 6.0. He found:

For most purposes a classification by entire magnitudes is more instructive than one by half magnitudes. From the third magnitude downward we may assume that 40 per cent, of the stars of each half magnitude belong to the magnitude next above, and 60 per cent, to that next below. We thus find that of