Identifier: beginnersstarboo00murp (find matches)
Title: A beginner's star-book; an easy guide to the stars and to the astronomical uses of the opera-glass, the field-glass and the telescope
Year: 1912 (1910s)
Authors: Murphy, Edgar Gardner, 1869-1913
Subjects: Astronomy
Publisher: New York, London, G.P. Putnam's Sons
Contributing Library: Wellesley College Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
to an observer with special gifts of mind or training. But this is by no means the case. If the stars greatly changed their position from night to night, confusion would be inevitable. But, though making their apparent revolution once each 24 hours, their places in relation to each other have been practically unaltered for unmeasured centuries. As we watch them, we quickly learn mentally to group the fainter ones about the brighter, according to outlines or figures * The two most important catalogues of the stars by magnitudes are that made by the Royal Observatory at Potsdam, Germany, and that made by the Observatory of Harvard University, U. S. A. A list of the 70 brightest stars is printed on p. 140, showing their relative magnitudes. The Stellar World that have descended to us from the past. Some of these traditional groupings seem to us illogical, but inasmuch as an attempt to change them (and to secure agreement as to the change) would only increase confusion, they have been retained.
Text Appearing After Image:
SPIRAL NEBULA, KNOWN AS MESSIER 51 From a photograph taken at the Yerkes Observatory In one respect, however, a change has already come. The ancient world saw in these groups of stars the figures of birds or animals or mythological heroes. These fancies served, for many centuries, a useful purpose. It was possible to designate the location of a star, for example, by reference to it as the brightest star in the head of the Dragon, or in the left foot of Andromeda, or in the head of Taurus, the Bull. But this method A Beginners Star-Book was necessarily crude, and never very accurate. In the seventeenth century (1603), a German astronomer named Bayer published a series of star-maps in which most of the brighter stars in each group were designated by letters of the Greek alphabet.* Romanletters came also to be employed, as well as our ordinary Arabic figures, 1, 2, 3, etc.,so that these shorter and easier symbols have gradually passed into universal usage. For readers of this book who may be

Note About Images