Sir John Frederick William Herschel - Results Of Astronomical Observations Made During The Years 1834, 5, 6, 7, 8, At The Cape Of Good Hope (1847)

Being A Completion of a Telescopic Survey of the Whole Surface of the Visible Heavens, commenced in 1825

Publisher's original green blindstamped cloth with gilt titles on spine.

Binding solid with wear to corners and cloth tear at the spine tail. Internally clean with no inscriptions except for a contemporary owner's name "J. R. Sutton" on half-title page. All pages clean with only some insect damage on the bottom corner of page xx of the introduction and the bottom corner of the following page (page 1 of the text). There is also some insect damage along the fold of plate no.8. The rest of the text and illustrations is clean.

Frontispiece has original tissue guard, xx, 452pp + 2pp errata, followed by 17 plates of which 4 are folding, 2pp adverts.

A first edition of Sir John Herschel's monumental survey of the southern skies. This volume compliments the task begun by his father William who, fifty years earlier, catalogued the northern celestial hemisphere.

"Using a twenty foot reflecting telescope, which he erected just south of Cape Town, Herschel swept the whole of the southern sky, cataloging nebulae, cluster and binary stars, carrying out the counts of over 68,000 stars. He made detailed drawings and maps." - Honeyman, page 1663.

Herschel came to South Africa and started his observations in March 1834. In the next four years he compiled an inventory of 70 000 stars and discovered 1 700 nebulae and 1 200 double stars. Other observations include the nebula around the star Eta Carinae, the circular star-cluster 47 Tucani, sun spots, Halley's comet (in 1835), the Magellanic Clouds as well as the first measurements of the luminosity of 65 bright stars. In 1840 he also measured the shifting luminosity of Betelgeuse. He returned to England in 1838 and after a few delays his monumental Cape Observations finally appeared in 1847. It contained catalogues and charts of nebulae and star clusters, the relative positions and luminosity of double stars as well as measurements of the luminosity of single stars.

"Herschel stands almost alone in his attempt to grapple with the dynamical problems presented by star-clusters, and his analysis of the Magellanic Clouds was decisive as to the status of nebulae" (Oxford DNB).