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INSCRIBED PRESENTATION COPY OF HERSCHEL S SURVEY OF THE SOUTHERN SKY. First edition, inscribed presentation copy, of Herschel s greatest astronomical work, inscribed to the Captain of the ship that brought Herschel and his family back from South Africa. This is a 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 chose 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). "Herschel stands almost alone in his attempt to grapple with the dynamical problems presented by star-clusters, and his analysis of the Magellanic Clouds was decisive as to the status of nebulae" (ODNB). "By the end of 1842 [Herschel] had performed without assistance the computations necessary for the publication [in this work] of his Cape observations. In September 1843 the letterpress was fairly begun, and after some delays the work appeared in 1847, at the cost of the Duke of Northumberland, in a large quarto volume, entitled Results of Astronomical Observations made during the years 1834 8 at the Cape of Good Hope. Besides the catalogues of nebulae and double stars, it included profound discussions of various astronomical topics, and was enriched with over sixty exquisite engravings. He insisted in it upon the connection of sun-spots with the Sun s rotation, and started the cyclonic theory of their origin. [Herschel] investigated graphically the distribution of nebulae, but fluctuated in his views as to their nature. Regarding them in 1825 as probably composed of a self-luminous or phosphorescent substance, gradually subsiding into stars and sidereal systems" (Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 2, p. 487), he ascribed to them later a stellar constitution, and finally inclined to suppose them formed of discrete luminous bodies floating in a non-luminous medium " (ODNB). ABPC/RBH list only three presentation copies. Provenance: Additional lithograph presentation leaf inserted before the half-title reading "Presented by Algernon Duke of Northumberland to" and completed in ink by Herschel as follows: "A. Henning Esqr. Lt. R.N. / With the Authors / Kind regards / J. F. H. June 5/49." "Herschel s first astronomical paper, on the computation of lunar occultations (1822), was published when he was already working in London on systematic observations of double stars with James South, the possessor of two excellent refracting telescopes. It had once been thought that a close pair of stars of differing magnitudes must result from the accidental near alignment of two similar stars at vastly different distances and that any apparent relative motion would be a parallactic effect of the motion of the earth around the sun. The pioneer work of [John s father] William Herschel had demonstrated orbital motion of binary stars under mutual attraction. John continued the work, re-observing known systems and discovering new ones, with detailed study of several cases, notably Gamma Virginis, and the development of methods (1833) for the determination of orbital elements. For their catalog of 380 double stars (1824) South and. Seller Inventory # 5354
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