Tag Archives: spectroscope

Chromospheric lines

“These are some of the problems in connection with the sun which are being investigated at the present time. Their complete solution will help to interpret the mystery, not only of the sun itself, but also of that type of stars of which the sun is a representative.”

―Frederick Slocum, The Study of Solar Prominences. Popular Astronomy, July 12, 1912.

Frederick Slocum (Brown University undergraduate class of 1895) received the first Ph.D. in astronomy at Brown in 1898 and served as assistant professor of astronomy from 1899 to 1909. He then became professor of astronomy at Wesleyan University in 1914 where he planned and supervised the construction of Van Vleck Observatory. The image below shows Slocum observing with a spectroscope attached to the main telescope at Ladd Observatory.

observing with a spectroscope
Observer Frederick Slocum using a spectroscope on the 12″ refractor at Ladd Observatory. March 15, 1905.

This spectroscope was made by the scientific instrument maker John Brashear of Pittsburgh in 1891. It is used to study the spectrum of colors in starlight. It could also be mounted on a table top to examine the spectrum of a chemical which is done to calibrate the instrument. During this era professor Winslow Upton used it in an attempt to predict rain.  It uses a prism or diffraction grating to disperse the light into a rainbow pattern of colors. This reveals dark Fraunhofer lines in the spectrum that can be used to identify the chemical elements present in the Sun or a distant star. Each chemical element has a unique pattern of these dark lines where specific colors are missing.

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Observing the “rain-bands”

The Leonid meteor shower was approaching and as the astronomers prepared cameras to capture the event they must have wondered: will the skies be clear tonight?

Leonids 1898
Astronomers preparing cameras to capture the Leonid meteor shower, Nov. 14, 1898.

Prof. Winslow Upton taught astronomy at Brown from 1883 until his death in 1914. He also had a keen interest in meteorology. He had been a professor of meteorology at the Weather Bureau of the U.S. Signal Survice from 1881 until 1883. In 1884 he was one of the organizers of the New England Meteorological Society and operated a weather station at Ladd Observatory starting in 1890. We can gain some insight into how he might have forecast the cloudiness of the sky by noting a curious instrument to the left of the cameras in the photo above.

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