Abstract
Far from city lights, the view of the night sky is dominated by stars. Th ey seem to be present in countless numbers. It comes as a surprise to learn that with the naked eye only about three thousand are visible at any given time. Most of these lie within a hundred, and all but a few within a thousand, light years of the Earth.
The fires that arch this dusky dot— Yon myriad-worlded way— The vast sun-clusters’ gather’d blaze, World-isles in lonely skies, Whole heavens within themselves, amaze Our brief humanities.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Epilogue”
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References
John B. Hearnshaw, The Analysis of Starlight: one hundred and fifty years of astronomical spectroscopy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), is the standard work on the subject.
James B. Kaler, Stars and their Spectra: an introduction to the spectral sequence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 62.
Abraham Wolf; quoted in Otto Struve, “The Classification of Stellar Spectra,” Sky & Telescope, May 1953, 184-187:184.
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Henry James, “Boston,” in The American Scene (1907), in Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America (New York: Library of America, 1993), 550.
Quoted in Jones and Gifford, Harvard College Observatory, 176.
Simon Newcomb, Reminiscences of an Astronomer (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1903), 67.
Jones and Boyd, Harvard College Observatory, 177.
E.C. Pickering, address to the Harvard Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, June 28, 1906. Harvard University Archives.
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An accessible account is: Sun Kwok, Cosmic Butterflies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
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Sheehan, W., Conselice, C.J. (2015). What Stuff Stars Are Made Of. In: Galactic Encounters. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85347-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85347-5_8
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