by John Church

For those of you who subscribe to Sky & Tel, there is an excellent reproduction of a drawing of the 1883 Caroline Island eclipse expedition on pages 28 and 29 of the April issue.  As show by the key map, the leftmost tent contains Hastings’ own 4-inch refractor and Rockwell’s 6-1/4-inch, which is the one that we have in our observatory with the lens made by Hastings himself.   This is a drawing rather than a photograph and doesn’t show all the details of the scope and the mount.

This drawing was originally published in Volume 2 of the Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, 1883.  For those of you who may have access to Princeton’s Firestone Library and want to see the actual book, its call number is  8001.863.65.   I ran this down when researching the history of our telescope back in the 1970’s.   

This is also online:  https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015035401903&seq=19.  This whole expedition was organized at the suggestion of Rockwell himself. 

Of additional interest is that using “our” scope, Hastings came to the erroneous conclusion that the corona was only a diffraction effect of the moon’s edge !!   See Sky & Tel for March 1978, p. 211-12.