Meridian Circle - Basic Instrument - Operation

Operation

At the focal plane, the eye end of the telescope had a number of vertical and one or two horizontal wires (crosshairs). In observing stars, the telescope was first directed downward at a basin of mercury forming a perfectly horizontal mirror and reflecting an image of the crosshairs back up the telescope tube. The crosshairs were adjusted until coincident with their reflection, and the line of sight was then perfectly vertical; in this position the circles were read for the nadir point.

The telescope was next brought up to the approximate declination of the target star by watching the finder circle. The instrument was provided with a clamping apparatus, by which the observer, after having set the approximate declination, could clamp the axis so the telescope could not be moved in declination, except very slowly by a fine screw. By this slow motion, the telescope was adjusted until the star moved along the horizontal wire (or if there were two, in the middle between them), from the east side of the field of view to the west. Following this, the circles were read by the microscopes for a measurement of the apparent altitude of the star. The difference between this measurement and the nadir point was the nadir distance of the star. A movable horizontal wire or declination-micrometer was also used.

Another method of observing the apparent altitude of a star was to take half of the angular distance between the star observed directly and its reflection observed in a basin of mercury. The average of these two readings was the reading when the line of sight was horizontal, the horizontal point of the circle. The small difference in latitude between the telescope and the basin of mercury was accounted for.

The vertical wires were used for observing transits of stars, each wire furnishing a separate result. The time of transit over the middle wire was estimated, during subsequent analysis of the data, for each wire by adding or subtracting the known interval between the middle wire and the wire in question. These known intervals were predetermined by timing a star of known declination passing from one wire to the other, the pole star being best on account of its slow motion.

Timings were originally made by an "eye and ear" method, estimating the interval between two beats of a clock. Later, timings were registered by pressing a key, the electrical signal making a mark on a strip recorder. Later still, the eye end of the telescope was usually fitted with an impersonal micrometer, a device which allowed matching a vertical crosshair's motion to the star's motion. Set precisely on the moving star, the crosshair would trigger the electrical timing of the meridian crossing, removing the observer's personal equation from the measurement.

The field of the wires could be illuminated; the lamps were placed at some distance from the piers in order not to heat the instrument, and the light passed through holes in the piers and through the hollow axis to the center, whence it was directed to the eye-end by a system of prisms.

To determine absolute declinations or polar distances, it was necessary to determine the observatory's colatitude, or distance of the celestial pole from the zenith, by observing the upper and lower culmination of a number of circumpolar stars. The difference between the circle reading after observing a star and the reading corresponding to the zenith was the zenith distance of the star, and this plus the colatitude was the north polar distance. To determine the zenith point of the circle, the telescope was directed vertically downwards at a basin of mercury, the surface of which formed an absolutely horizontal mirror. The observer saw the horizontal wire and its reflected image, and moving the telescope to make these coincide, its optical axis was made perpendicular to the plane of the horizon, and the circle reading was 180° + zenith point.

In observations of stars refraction was taken into account as well as the errors of graduation and flexure. If the bisection of the star on the horizontal wire was not made in the centre of the field, allowance was made for curvature, or the deviation of the star's path from a great circle, and for the inclination of the horizontal wire to the horizon. The amount of this inclination was found by taking repeated observations of the zenith distance of a star during the one transit, the pole star being the most suitable because of its slow motion.

Attempts were made to record the transits of a star photographically. A photographic plate was placed in the focus of a transit instrument and a number of short exposures made, their length and the time being registered automatically by a clock. The exposing shutter was a thin strip of steel, fixed to the armature of an electromagnet. The plate thus recorded a series of dots or short lines, and the vertical wires were photographed on the plate by throwing light through the objective lens for one or two seconds.

Read more about this topic:  Meridian Circle, Basic Instrument

Famous quotes containing the word operation:

    Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.
    Francis Bacon (1560–1626)

    An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.
    Henri Bergson (1859–1941)

    Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.
    Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)