9 - Solar observations

Summary

… after our failure but one idea seemed to possess all, and that was to get away from Oran and on our homeward voyage as quickly as possible.

– William Crookes

By the 1870s, when William Huggins assumed responsibility for the Great Grubb Equatorial, the discipline of astronomical physics was developing on many fronts. Which would open up the most fruitful line of investigation? No one knew. Unabashedly eclectic in his research interests and methods, Huggins shrewdly ventured down many paths that promised discovery and recognition. Sometimes – but not always – he encountered new opportunities to press the spectroscope into service.

Concern for priority with its attendant thrill of the chase occasionally provoked him to examine the Sun, just as solar observers like Lockyer were drawn to study stars and nebulae. Huggins was not always happy with the results of his solar investigations, however, and they are conspicuously missing from his retrospective account, ‘The new astronomy’. Because his biographers and historians of science have relied heavily on this essay for details of his career, his contributions to the rapidly growing body of knowledge about the Sun and its atmosphere have been all but forgotten.

The unpublished record brings light and life to these episodes once again. Huggins learned a great deal about discovery's delicate dance from his setbacks and failures, and so can we.