Justin Croft Antiquarian Books - Rare and Antiquarian Books and Manuscripts

FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY, OF A PIONEERING WORK IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF LUNAR AND STELLAR PHOTOGRAPHY. Mouchez was director of the Paris Observatory and commissioned two young astronomers, Prosper and Paul Henry, to prepare a photographic star atlas. "Arago had embarked on a program of improving Lalande's catalog of 50,000 stars with the aid of new, more precise measurements. Mouchez published the part observed up to 1875. Most notably, however, he enlisted the support of Sir David Gill, director of the Cape Observatory, to bring about an international astronomical congress at Paris in 1887. It was there decided to produce photographically a large-scale general map of the heavens and to establish a catalog giving the position and brightness of all stars up to the eleventh magnitude. Two young astronomers at the Paris observatory, the brothers Prosper and Paul Henry, both of whom were also talented opticians, had just completed an astrograph and Mouchez had it adopted for this gigantic undertaking, which took more than fifty years" (DSB). The first photograph (the frontispiece) depicts the moon's surface around the crater Eratosthenes; the second is of the Hercules cluster of stars; the third is a time-lapse series of depicting Jupiter, showing the rotation of the red spot; the fourth shows the rings of Saturn and the bands of Jupiter. This copy is inscribed by Mouchez to General Brugers, the future military governor of Paris.