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.
Sweep on through glittering star fields and long for endless night! More nebulae, more stars. Here a bright and beautiful star overpowering in its brilliancy, and there close to it a tiny point of light seen with the greatest difficulty, a large star and its companion. How plentiful the stars now appear. Each sweep increases their number. The field is sprinkled with them, and now we suddenly sweep into myriads and swarms of glittering, sparkling points of brilliancy — we have entered the Milky Way. We are in the midst of millions and millions of suns — we are in the jewel house of the Maker, and our soul mounts up, up to that wonderful Creator, and we adore the hand that scattered the jewels of heaven so lavishly in this one vast region. No pen can describe the wonderful scene that the swinging tube reveals as it sweeps among that vast array of suns.
—Edward Emerson Barnard, The Nashville Artisan (1883)
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References
Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior and other Writings, Sam Hamill, trans. (Boston and London: Shambala, 2000), 29.
Lafcadio Hearn, The Romance of the Milky Way, and other studies and stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1905).
Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower (Oxford and New York: the World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1993), 33-34.
Sir John Herschel, Outlines of Astronomy, 449.
Huggins, “New Astronomy,” 913.
Holden, “Monograph of the Central Parts of the Nebula of Orion,” 227.
The most complete biography of Barnard is William Sheehan, The Immortal Fire Within: the life and work of Edward Emerson Barnard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Sheehan, Immortal Fire, 3.
Ibid., 4.
Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion,” Cognition and Emotion, 17(2) (2003), 297-314.
Sheehan, Immortal Fire, 4.
Bruce Catton, The Civil War (New York: The Fairfax Press, 1980), 260.
Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 119.
Sheehan, Immortal Fire, 5-7.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid.
Ibid., 11
Ibid.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 15.
As summarized in Donald E. Osterbrock, “The Rise and Fall of Edward S. Holden: Part I,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, xv (1984):81.
Sheehan, Immortal Fire, 274.
Ibid.
Ibid., 340-341.
Ibid., 343.
Ibid., 342.
E.E. Barnard, Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1927), description of Plate 26.
Ibid., description of Plate 19.
E.E. Barnard, “Some of the dark markings in the sky and what they suggest,” Astrophysical Journal, 43 (1916), 1-8:4.
E. B. Frost, in ibid., vi.
On the other hand, the original is very scarce, and when a copy becomes available, it is extremely costly; one recently sold on e-bay for $12,500, which was actually a steal. A commendable effort is Gerald Orin Dobek, ed., A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), which has the added merit of presenting Barnard’s original two volumes (plates in volume 1, diagrams showing the identification of significant objects in volume 2) within one cover.
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Sheehan, W., Conselice, C.J. (2015). Fields of Glory. In: Galactic Encounters. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85347-5_7
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