A popular guide to the use of the telescope as a means of amusement and instruction. Twelfth edition, with illustrations.
London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896
Charming popular guide to the telescope. Twelfth edition of this charming, popular work on the use of telescopes.
'A man of unbounded energy and wide interests, Proctor's gifts of vivid clarity, lecturing style, and scientific exactness in writing on many subjects gained him renown. He wrote at least 500 essays, 83 technical astronomy papers, and 57 books... Between 1870 and 1914 "the impact of his publications was immense; thousands were introduced to astronomy by them" (Crowe, 548). Proctor was held in high esteem by contemporaries as an original investigator. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1866, to its council in 1868, was a secretary in 1872, and was a prolific contributor to its Monthly Notices. Among papers on the distribution of stars and nebulae, perhaps his greatest scientific work resulted from the 400 hours copying Argelander's 324,198 stars on to an equal surface chart. By this, and well illustrated papers in Monthly Notices, contemporaries credited him with demolishing Sir William Herschel's theory of the stellar universe. Proctor showed that the aggregation of stars in the Milky Way was real, not merely optical. He urged others to study structure by observing small areas to fainter magnitudes, a precursor of Jacob Kapteyn's later work. In 1869 he was among the first to advocate the theory of the solar corona and inner solar envelope... His research deriving the rotation period of Mars within an error of 0.005 seconds was highly regarded, and is within 0.25 seconds of what later became the accepted value' (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
Twelfth edition; 8vo; folding frontispiece and 6 plates with tissue guards 3 pages of integral ads at rear, title and frontispiece toned and spotted; original dark green cloth blocked in gilt and blind with a design of a telescope on the upper board, black coated endpapers, cloth fresh, an excellent copy; 109pp.
'A man of unbounded energy and wide interests, Proctor's gifts of vivid clarity, lecturing style, and scientific exactness in writing on many subjects gained him renown. He wrote at least 500 essays, 83 technical astronomy papers, and 57 books... Between 1870 and 1914 "the impact of his publications was immense; thousands were introduced to astronomy by them" (Crowe, 548). Proctor was held in high esteem by contemporaries as an original investigator. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1866, to its council in 1868, was a secretary in 1872, and was a prolific contributor to its Monthly Notices. Among papers on the distribution of stars and nebulae, perhaps his greatest scientific work resulted from the 400 hours copying Argelander's 324,198 stars on to an equal surface chart. By this, and well illustrated papers in Monthly Notices, contemporaries credited him with demolishing Sir William Herschel's theory of the stellar universe. Proctor showed that the aggregation of stars in the Milky Way was real, not merely optical. He urged others to study structure by observing small areas to fainter magnitudes, a precursor of Jacob Kapteyn's later work. In 1869 he was among the first to advocate the theory of the solar corona and inner solar envelope... His research deriving the rotation period of Mars within an error of 0.005 seconds was highly regarded, and is within 0.25 seconds of what later became the accepted value' (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
Twelfth edition; 8vo; folding frontispiece and 6 plates with tissue guards 3 pages of integral ads at rear, title and frontispiece toned and spotted; original dark green cloth blocked in gilt and blind with a design of a telescope on the upper board, black coated endpapers, cloth fresh, an excellent copy; 109pp.
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