Historic Photographs by William and Margaret Lindsay Huggins

Abstract

Copies of two historic photographs taken by William (1824-1910) and Margaret Lindsay Huggins (1848-1915) have been located in the Charles Augustus Young papers, Special Collections, Dartmouth College Library.1The first photograph (labelled April 1888, 51mm x 56mm), was taken of an uneclipsed Sun. The Hugginses believed it might show the solar corona. The second (labelled Pseudo-Corona, 57mm x 60mm), was intended to serve as a comparison. Each photograph is pasted onto a piece of 8cm x 11cm card stock.In a letter to Young, dated 14 July 1889, Huggins wrote:I had been looking forward to this spring to make definitive experiments as to the possibility of photographing the corona without an eclipse. The weather has been unusually fine, but everyday and always the sky has been whitev and not blue, and I have not found a single opportunity when it was worth while to take a photograph. Under these circumstances I am not in a position to say anything more than I have said on the matter. As however, Sir G[eorge Gabriel] Stokes [1819-1903] holds a strong opinion that I have succeeded on some exceptionally fine days in getting the corona, I thought that I should like you to see one of these photographs, partly because I am sure you feel much interest in the matter, & partly because I should value greatly your opinion of the photograph.I send by bookpost two photographs, one a pseudo-corona due to sky-glare, the other which you will see at once is quite different a photograph which Stokes regards as showing the sun's corona....I wish you to understand that I confess, myself, at present no opinion on the matter; but the enormous importance of getting information of the corona, together with Sir G. Stokes' strong opinion in favour of my method, induces me to send you these photographs, and I shall be grateful if you will tell me candidly what you think.2The Hugginses posted the two photographs to Young on 16 July 1889.I have described the Hugginses' exhaustive efforts to secure a photograph of the solar corona without an eclipse in this journal and elsewhere.3 In 1894, the American astronomer George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) prepared an excellent summary of Huggins's published accounts of these efforts.4 In a handful of entries, Margaret Huggins discussed their corona work in the Tulse Hill Observatory Notebooks.5 Until now, however, no evidence of surviving plates, films or prints obtained during their attempts to photograph the corona without an eclipse had been found.Since January 2013,1 have been preparing for publication annotated transcriptions of correspondence and other materials gathered during the course of my research on William Huggins.6 The close attention to detail required by this work recently brought into relief a slender but common thread that I had overlooked while sifting through Huggins's letters for evidence that would connect with the larger issues I was investigating.This slender thread - a recurring reference to 24 April 1888 - appears in Huggins's correspondence between February 1888 and June 1892 with Stokes, E. S. Holden (1846-1914; director of the Lick Observatory) and David Gill (1843-1914; Her Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope). In these letters, we learn that Huggins had photographed the Sun in spring 1888 hoping to capture the solar corona without an eclipse. After examining several of these photographs, Stokes expressed his view that one in particular, taken on 24 April, did, indeed, show the solar corona. …