Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/501

Rh correctly, concluded that the objects seen were well-known neighboring stars.

The perfecting of dry-plate photography gave renewed interest to the search for Vulcan, both when passing over the solar surface and at times of eclipse. Although the sun has been photographed almost daily during the past twenty years, at one observatory or another, no experienced observer has seriously claimed that his plates recorded an unknown planet crossing the sun. Neither were eclipse searches more successful: the well-known bright stars lying nearly in the direction of the sun were photographed, but no strange bodies. Curiously enough, the optical principles governing the efficiency of cameras in this search were overlooked for many years, and faint objects near the sun—say stars fainter than the fourth magnitude—were not observable, because their images, though formed on the photographic plates, were overwhelmed and buried from sight in the general darkening of the photograph by the bright-sky background. It was not until 1900 that the elements of the problem of photographing faint bodies near the sun were comprehended. While preparing for the eclipse of that year, three astronomers, Professor W. H. Pickering, of Harvard College Observatory, and Messrs. Perrine and Campbell, of the Lick Observatory, independently arrived at the same simple conclusion that the focal lengths of the intramercurial-search cameras should be relatively long, in order to reduce the intensity of the sky exposure on the plates without reducing the intensity of the star images, and thus let the latter be seen on the negative. The principles involved are so simple as hardly to call for elucidation.

Let the two cameras have lenses of equal aperture, say 3 inches, of equal transparency and capable of covering equal angular fields of view, say a circle 10 degrees in diameter. Let one be of short focus, 21 inches, and the other of long focus, 135 inches. The powers of the two lenses to record stellar points on the sensitive plates in focus, under good atmospheric conditions, are not very unequal, for the two lenses collect equal quantities of light and condense the light into images of very nearly the same size. Both collect the same quantity of sky light, but the longer-focus camera spreads it (more thinly) over an area (135)2/(21)2 = 41 times the greater. It is evident that faint-star images hopelessly lost to view on the sky-blackened small plate may be seen with ease on the nearly clear glass of the large plate. "We may safely say that the large plate will show images of stars 3 or 3 magnitudes fainter than the small plate. The same advantage exists for small intramercurial planets as for stars, provided the exposures do not exceed two or three minutes in length, as they seldom do at eclipses. In longer exposures on intramercurial planetoids the advantage would usually be lost, as their rapid (and unknown) motions would cause their