Commission 24. (Stellar Parallaxes and Proper Motions.)

Extract

There were two meetings of the Commission. The first meeting was devoted to an informal discussion of programmes for parallax work. The second session was devoted to a discussion of systematic errors. The President gave a brief summary of the two latest determinations of the systematic errors of trigonometric parallaxes, by Schlesinger (parallaxes published to 1924) and by van Maanen (parallaxes to 1927). Both investigators had used the same basis of comparison, namely, the Mt Wilson spectroscopic parallaxes, and both had made the same fundamental assumption, namely, that the systematic errors of the spectroscopic parallaxes depending on right ascension were negligible.