Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 February 1892 — Discoveries Made by Photography. [ARTICLE]

Discoveries Made by Photography.

Photography applied to astronomical purposes is continually achieving unlooked-for triumphs. One of the latest is the discovery of previously unknown objects on the moon. The photographs of the moon made with the great Lick telescope on Mount Hamilton, in California, are the finest in the world, and last summer the ruins of a huge crater, some fifty miles in diameter, were discovered by means of one of these photographs. The ruins lie near the celebrated crater mountain called Copernicus. With telescopes alone these rocky ruins had escaped attention}' but on the exquisitely clear negative of the photograph they were discernible. There sterns to be something in the quality of the light reflected from this spot in the moon which enables its features to print their image more sharply on the photographic plate than they appear to the eye even when aided by a powerful telescope. Apparently the ruined crater in question has bad its walls broken down and nearly buried by vast outflows of lava which have burst from the interior of the moon in its neighborhood. Copernicus, although itself immensely old and long since extinct, is evidently far younger than its ruined neighbor. More recently Prof. Weinek, of Prague, in examining the photographic negative of the moon made by the Lick telescope, has discovered upon them the remains of another great crater wall at some distance southeast of the well-known crater named Triesnecker. Prof. Weinek finds that the negatives are so perfect that they must be strongly magnified in order that all the minute details which they contain shall be rendered visible. No one can yet fix a limit to the power of photography to reveal what would otherwise be hidden from human eyes in the depths of space.