HERSCHEL, John F.W

Results of Astronomical Observations...

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Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1847. Quarto, lithographed frontispiece, a few woodcut diagrams, 17 numbered plates of stars and nebulae after Herschel (four folding) of which 13 engraved by James Basire and four lithographed; occasional light foxing; original green cloth, a good copy. Herschel's monumental survey of the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, a complement to his father's survey of the northern celestial hemisphere. Herschel devoted five years to the project, which he had chosen to carry out at the Cape of Good Hope. In a suburb south of Cape Town he constructed a 20-foot reflecting telescope, with which he methodically explored the night skies.

'By 1838 he had swept the whole of the southern sky, catalogued 1,707 nebulae and clusters, and listed 2,102 pairs of binary stars. He carried out star counts, on William Herschel's plan, of 68,948 stars in 3,000 sky areas... He produced detailed sketches and maps of several objects, including the Orion region, the Eta Carinae nebula, and the Magellanic Clouds, and extremely accurate drawings of many extragalactic and planetary nebulae... Herschel invented a device called an astrometer, which enabled him to compare the brightness of stars with an image of the full moon of which he could control the apparent brightness, and thus introduced numerical measurements into stellar photometry' (DSB). He dedicated the work to the memory of Hugh Percy, third Duke of Northumberland (1785-1847), chancellor of Cambridge University and a patron of science, who had died shortly before the book's publication.
Norman Catalogue, 1056.

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