Connecticut western news., 1895-02-14
A STUDY OF THE SUN.
A FASCINATING RECREATION WHICH
 ANY ONE MAY ENJOY.

ANY ONE MAY ENJOY.
 How It May Be Observed Without Danger. A Method of Getting Perfectly Pure Beam For Inspection-A Lesson In As
 tronomy Couched In Simple Terms-
 Every day a royal presence, attended by numerous unseen courtiers, sweeps across the sky. Tho sun looks us so boldly in the face that we are compelled to veil ourselves from his accursing gaze. Let us commence our new studies by contemplating his nt- tractiveness-
 A piece Of well smoked glass will give us good service. If this be covered with another piece, with strips of paper at the edges to separate them and prevent rub ping, and other mucilaged strips to bina the outer edges, we shall have respecta ble and lasting astronomical instrument
 The eye may now examine tho dazzling orb without danger, and 1t will discover a disk which is apparently no larger than that of the full moon, but the fact that the sun Is about 400 times farther away accounts for the resemblance in size. But the disk is not all of the immense world, for a very important envelope of vast di-
  struments. The limb of the sun is seen to be not quite so bright as the central DOT tions, because the light from it has to penetrate greater depth of atmosphere.
 Occasionally we see spot" upon the solar surface, in which case it must be very large, but If we are fortunate enough to have access to even a small spyglass we shall many times see spots There are years when the spots are very numerous (the writer counted 16S one day and more than 300 on a day in 1SeS), and years when none is seen for months, and this appears to be governed by period" of about II years
 If WIG use telescope with our smoked glass, the spectacle will be cautiously in- teresting, for the object glass-a very large eye-gathers many rays of light and bends them to a focus producing a magnified image which is yet more enlarged by the eyepiece, which is a microscope. Now, the very grain of tho sun, so to speak, is visible, the surface being completely fleoked with gray white matter, while here and rehuge masses of white protrude. These latter are called facule and are usually associated with the spots which are de- | pressions in the surface-deep, dark cayi- | ties, but dark only as contrasted with the | shining regions for they are brighter than the calcium light. Very recently the writ CT measured large group and found that it occupied an area of more than 100, 000 | miles in length and about three-fourths as wide, into which could be cast 100 earths | without crowding them. Still larger | groups have sometimes been noticed. | Watching the spots from day to day re- veals the time of revolution of the sun upon its axis, about 25 days, which means that one day on the sun is as long as 2t | of ours
 As yet the sun has not yielded the secret | of its composition, and the telescope, un. aided, is inadequate to solve the mystery. | Perhaps in childhood we beguiled hours of church service, which were a trifie wearisome to little ones, by noticing the | play of color in the ''lusters" which hung | in profusion from the old fashioned lamps | How little we dreamed that the sun was | whispering through this simple medium | intelligible messages of very high impor- tance, for this three faced form of glass is called prism, the change of direction oi objects viewed through it being due to tho bending (refraction) of the rays of light | passing through it, and the color fringe along the edges of the images the primary rays of which white light is composed, which is easily proved by passing the col ored rays through another prism, wher they form a beam of white light onos | more.
 The same color band, or spectrum, is shown by a grating of parallel wires strung in frame, or by a close grained feather, or even by the eyelashes when tho eye is half closed.
 But we can easily improve upon these primitive instruments by employing { series of prisms of fine construction or ( { grating produced by ruling lines with z diamond upon a piece of perfectly flat and highly polished speculum metal.
 To get a perfectly pure beam for inspec tion we let the telescopic image of the sur fall upon delicate slit in Q metal plate which is in the focus of the object glass o little telescope, whose duty it is to mak, parallel the rays to be examined, an6 which sends them through the series o prisms referred to or causes them to fal upon a grating. In either case they ars viewed by another little telescope. and tn, beam of sunlight tells its story in a mag niflcent spectrum, far exceeding the rares touches of world renowned artists.
 Now for the precious secretl The beau tiful color band Is threaded with thousand' of slender dark lines, which correspond with the bright lines, which are the sigr | we need only to put pinch of salt in th' flame of a candle and let the light fal alongside the suns image on the slit when there will be two spectra, side b, side. and the two bright yellow lines o sodium will exactly coincide with two black lines in the orange of the solar spec trum, and the crowning proof appear when the calcium light Is permitted tt shine through the candle flame, instantl, turning the bright lines to dark ones. s, with the lines of other metals. We bav, learned from the suns own messages aft CT journey of 93, 900, 900 miles, that it | a gaseous body; that many of the metal of earth are yaporized in Its awful tenn perature and that the surface is probabl, shell of luminous clouds surrounded b, an atmosphere" of gases thousands O miles deep, out of which squirt for hun dreds of thousands of miles, with a speed in contrast with which the movement O whirlwinds on earth is a dead calm, jets O flaming hydrogen interiningled with tn metallic vapors, which, becoming cooles by exposure to the cold of space, fall upor the surface and cause the depression known as spots.-Philadelph Ledger. | |
 | Zero.