91
5.3 Mastery of Visual Representation of Solar Features
In my book Mapping the Spectrum (Oxford 2002), readers can find very broad evidence and documentation that spectroscopists during the second half of the nineteenth century were extraordinarily visually oriented. This visual culture was by no
means restricted to their main instrument, the spectroscope and spectrograph, and to
their main representational device, the spectrum map. The instrument maker and
optician Josef Fraunhofer, the astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth, the physicist
Alexander Herschel and his father, the pioneer photographer John Herschel, or the
Fig. 5.5 Photographs of the solar eclipse of 1860 taken by Angelo Secchi during an expedition to
Spain. Letters of the alphabet identify the various prominences then visible. In the top left photograph, taken at a longer exposure time, one also sees the solar corona as a bright ring surrounding
the solar surface. This was, in fact, one of the first successful photographs of the solar corona
worldwide,
available
online
at
http://starlight.inaf.it/1860/07/mas- sobreeclipse- de- sol- del- 18- del- presente/
5 Angelo Secchi, Stellar Spectroscopy, Solar Physics, and Visual Science Culture
5.3 Mastery of Visual Representation of Solar Features
In my book Mapping the Spectrum (Oxford 2002), readers can find very broad evidence and documentation that spectroscopists during the second half of the nineteenth century were extraordinarily visually oriented. This visual culture was by no
means restricted to their main instrument, the spectroscope and spectrograph, and to
their main representational device, the spectrum map. The instrument maker and
optician Josef Fraunhofer, the astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth, the physicist
Alexander Herschel and his father, the pioneer photographer John Herschel, or the
Fig. 5.5 Photographs of the solar eclipse of 1860 taken by Angelo Secchi during an expedition to
Spain. Letters of the alphabet identify the various prominences then visible. In the top left photograph, taken at a longer exposure time, one also sees the solar corona as a bright ring surrounding
the solar surface. This was, in fact, one of the first successful photographs of the solar corona
worldwide,
available
online
at
http://starlight.inaf.it/1860/07/mas- sobreeclipse- de- sol- del- 18- del- presente/
5 Angelo Secchi, Stellar Spectroscopy, Solar Physics, and Visual Science Culture