Abstract
William Herschel was the first astronomer to push his investigation beyond the Solar System and to expressly concern himself with the stars and nebulae—the “construction of the heavens.” We now know that it was actually his sister, Caroline, who preceded him and who first showed how much remained to be done. When he began, about a hundred of the nebulae were known, catalogued by Messier and a few others; by the time he finished, he had added nebulae by the thousands, and noted their astonishing variety.
Over us, like some great cathedral dome, The observatory loomed against the sky; And the dark mountain with its headlong gulfs Had lost all memory of the world below; For all those cloudless throngs of glittering stars And all those glimmerings where the abyss of space Is powdered with a milky dust, each grain A burning sun, and every sun the lord Of its own darkling planets,—all those lights Met, in a darker deep, the lights of earth, Lights on the sea, lights of invisible towns, Trembling and indistinguishable from stars…
—Alfred Noyes, Watchers of the Sky, Prologue: The Observatory
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References
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A very clear exposition of this is found in Maria Luiza Bedran, “A comparison between the Doppler and cosmological redshifts, American Journal of Physics, 70, 4 (April 2002), 406-408.
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Sheehan, W., Conselice, C.J. (2015). From Olympus. In: Galactic Encounters. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85347-5_11
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