Morning journal and courier., 1883-01-31
Sights With a Telescope.

l.
 The Mysterious Companion of the
 Dog Star-The Great NebuIa.
 From the New York Sun.J
 Is The great blue dome of the Halstead Ob
 servatory rising bodily above the lofty walls
 of gray stone which lift it out of the dust
 and smoke of the little town, is the most
 striking edifice in Princeton. It gives an air of terudition to the place. The traveller sec ing it confronting him as he alights at the
 railroad station feels at once that he is in a
 university town, where the gravity of learn
 ing lends unwonted weight and dignity to all things, even to the chanticleer who, some what haughtily, though gravely and deco
 rously, eyes him from 8 neighboring fence
 without indulging in any unscholarly and
 unmannerly growing. One can imagine the 'fSpaniRrds looking with something like awe I upon the returned ships of Columbus. A T great observatory seems to produce similar effect. The magical charm of discovery
 hovers around it-discevery not among con- tinents and islands on the other side of the earth, but among suns and worlds soaring in
 the heavens, many of which are far grander and more glorious than our own.
 The new telescope which has recently been 1 mounted in the observatory at Princeton is, I with the exception of the one in Washington, l the largest in this country. Its object glass lacks but one inch of being two feet in di- ameter, and the cigar-shaped tube of steel is l about thirty feet long. It ranks with the | d 1 few years have beea placed in the hands of 1 the astronomers of the world, but of whose I astonishing achievements the public has l heard but little. Sir William Herschel would have thrown away his big rehectors in l disgust if he could have caught glimpse of
 the heavens through one of these telescopes. l People who are not familiar with the prog ress of astronomy have no notion of work l that is being done in the great observatory overlooking the battle ground of Princeton 1 work that is changing the whole outlook for l the human mind putting the sarth, as 1t were, into communication with it's neighbors
 in the heavens, as steam engines and the tel egraph have linked together the four guar
 ters of the globe. People generally have no conception of what modern astronomers
 have achieved. Take, for instance, their studies of the planet Mars. If it were told
 of some ancient people, it would be set down
 as an idle fable, yet it is 8 fact that our as l tronomers to-day have 8 more comprehensive
 knowledge of the geography of Mars than any body in the time of Columbus had of the
 geography of the earth. They have made l careful maps of the whole planet, filled with l astonishing details, and if an astronomer were suddenly transported to Mars and set | down at some given point upon its surface, he would not, by any means, feel that he was lost. Given his latitude and longitude, he | would know that in a certain direction and at 8 distance of certain number of miles lay the body of water named in his maps the Lake of the Sun, or Lockyer Sea, and that in another direction was the continent of Copernicus. He would know whether he was standing upon an island or the mainland, | what the general shape of the land was, and which was the shortest route to the sea coast. If the inhabitants of Mars were not inclined to maritime enterprise and geographical ex- planation, he would be able to sell them more than they had ever known of the form and position of the lands and seas of their globe, ! and might, perhaps, earn comfortable iv- ing in 8 strange world by opening school for instruction in martial geography. These same astronomers have not only weighed the sun and discovered of what materials it is composed, but they have also analysed the stars and shown that in many of them the same clements exist with which we are fa-
 miliar on earth. They have proved that, so far from our sun being the only one. the un- iverse lg sprinkled with many millions of suns. They have found that worlds and suns go through 8 process of development and by looking at the spectrum of star they can tell whether it is probably older or younger than the sun. They have discovered suns, some larger than ours, which, grouped
 together in pairs and by threes and fours, are swinging around a common centre. They have found spots in the heavens that are fair
 ly bedded and ablaze with suns With their
 eyes one may look upon chaos itself, for they tell us that the so- called gaseous nebulss are realis portions of the universe which have not yet been organized into solar systems.
 In view of these facts, an account of the wonderful scenes which are opened up in the celestial spaces by the great Princeton tele- scope, and which are seldom enjoyed by any body except an astronomer, must possess in terest for all readers. The Princeton tele- 1 scope is particularly interesting, because 1t is in charge of one of the foremost of living astronomers, Professor c. A. Young, who | has made some of the most important addi- l ff fao1c ,foF, hos ceived in modern times. An amateur astron- | omer, who recently spent an evening in the | Princeton observatory, tells this story of what he saw:
 'sWe began with Saturn. I have often studied Saturn with 8 small telescope, and have never known person to look at that | planet for the first time, even with such an | instrument, without 8 cry of surprise and admiration. But Saturn, as shown by the | Princeton telescope, was revelation to ne.
 Think of globe almost seven hundred times | as large as the earth suspended in sL ace in | the middle of three or four concentric rings, | which are nearly forty thousand miles broad | and more than four hundred thousand miles | in circuit, but less than one hundred miles | thick, and turned edgewise toward the plan l cts equator This tremendous ringed world, | together with the eight moons that revolve | around it, appears to the naked eye only as | dull looking star; but imagine it brought so | near that it's globe alone appears many times | larger than the full moon, while all it's sur | roundings are equally msgnifed, and you | great telescope. The question naturally l arises in the mind of the observer, tEIs it | possible that this marvellous planet can be | inhabited ?" It is easy for the imagination | to picture the appearance of those rings as seen from different points on Saturn, here 1 hiding the sun and burying large portion of | the planet in their shadow. There is some | curious evidence tending to show that the | rings are falling, or rather being drawn down toward the planet, and that in three or four centuries they will touch it and eventually fall to pieces as it were, thus robbing the | heavens of one of the strangest phenomena that man has ever looked upon. If Saturn were inhabited, what 8 tremendous event the | destruction of the rings would be for the in hahitants to look forward to! But it seems to me that the revelations of this monster telescope show plainly enough that Saturn is not yet inhabited Everybody knows that modern astronomers generally rega- Saturn, together with Jupiter and the other larger planets, as not yet being cooled down and permanently crusted over like the earth. Geologically they are many ages younger than the earth. They are yet in a fiery and r perhaps partly vaporous condition. But the effect of the mere reading of such statements bears no sort of proportion to that produced by actually looking upon world which has not yet cooled down. AS gaZeQ AG Oaburn saw how the earth probably looked ages be- fore man was created, when it was without form and void.' and when darkness was upon the face of the deep.' It was a startling as we'll as an intensely interesting thing to be thus brought face to face with that awful genesis of 8 world, to be enabled to look upon those formative processes which are vaguely hinted at in the Bible history of the earth's beginning. Saturn's future oceans are suspended as mighty clouds in It's atmos- phere, tossing and heaying with motion that is all but perceptible in, the telescope. I was not fortunate enough to witness any thing of the kind, but at times great tele scopes have shown the distortions in the planets outline produced by the heaying of the vast sea of vapor surrounding it. Its fntu1a continents, yet burning hot, or per haps mere expenses of liquid fire, are hidden beneath veil of steam and smoke. But when it is ready to receive and nour1sh living beings what magnificent world it will be All the earth's fifteen hundred millions of in habftants would hardly more than suffice to people one of it's islands. How many mil lions of years, asked myself. will pass be- fore race resembling man begins to explore Saturn, to settle it and cultivate it, to build cities and fleets there It would be flight worthy of new DssdaIus to reach the rings
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