Abstract
After informal discussions in St. Louis and a trip to Cape of Good Hope, where he also presented his Star Streams, and after having carefully built a wide consensus, Kapteyn proposed his Plan of Selected Areas. This work, co-ordinated from Groningen, was designed to collect as much information as possible on as many stars as possible in a set of over 200 carefully selected small areas all over the sky. The ultimate purpose was to derive the distribution of stars in space and the structure of the Sidereal System. It involved many astronomers and observatories, particularly Edward Pickering from Harvard. The impressive Harvard-Groningen Durchmusterung was published partly before and partly after Kapteyn’s death. Eventually the ‘Plan’ kept his successor Pieter van Rhijn occupied for many years.
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Notes
- 1.
Anatole France , born François-Anatole Thibault, was a French poet and novelist. This quote is from Le Jardin d’Épicure, translation Alfred Allinson in The Works of Anatole France in an English Translation (1920).
- 2.
Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer and biologist.
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van der Kruit, P.C. (2015). Selected Areas. In: Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 416. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10876-6_10
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