STUDYING THE PLANETS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 932, 17 December 1910, Page 4

STUDYING THE PLANETS.

Professor Lowell, the well-known American astronomer, during his recent lecture at the Royal Institution, explained some remarkable photographs of planets taken at Flagstaff Observatory. Certain of the photographs were produced on a screen. The lecturer said that the marvellous feat of inducing the canals of Mars to write their own signatures on a photographic plate was first performed, after long and patient study, by his assistant, Mr Lamplaud. The technical word “canals ” does not mean canals that are dug, explains the lecturer, but artificially fertilised strips of country, connected with, and vivified by, the turning to such account of the melting of the Polar cap. In regard to Jupiter, they found a completely different set of features registered on the places, utterly unlike those of Mars. There were bells, bright and dark, banding the disc half-way to the poles. With us the heat that caused cloud came from without; with Jupiter from within. They had visual evidence of this internal heat of Jupiter in the cherry-red that tinged his darker belts as if they there looked down into the seething cauldron below. These belts had another peculiarity. Their several parts were travelling at idiosyncratic rates. Saturn, at first a great red spot, and which lasted as such to within a few years, was the most difficult of the three planets to photograph. Now, properly speaking, one saw only the grave in which it lay buried, the oval shell it once occupied. So faintly was it illuminated that whereas it took but two seconds for a photograph of Mars, it took twenty or more for Saturn. Fe pointed out the beautiful elliptical figures of the rings, a symmetrical correctness wonderfully pleasing to the eye, and which the best drawings failed to reproduce. These photographs constituted in themselves the beginning of a set of records in which the future of the planets might be confronted with their achieved past. They were the histories of the planets written by themselves, their autobiographies penned by light.