exactly in the calculated orbit. In Reminiscences of an Astronomer, p. 138, Prof. Newcomb tells the story. According to him, an American astronomer then did more than confirm Struve’s observations: he not only saw but exactly measured the supposed companion.
A defect was found between the lenses of Struve’s telescope: it was found that this telescope showed a similar “companion,” about 10″ from every large star. It was found that the more than “confirmatory” determinations by the American astronomer had been upon “a long well-known star.” (Newcomb)
Every astronomic triumph is a bright light accompanied by an imbecility, which may for a while make it variable with diminishments and then be unnoticed. Priestcrafts are not merely tyrannies: they’re necessities. There must be more reassuring ways of telling this story. The good priest J. E. Gore (Studies in Astronomy, p. 104) tells it safely—not a thing except that, in the year 1873, a companion of Procyon’s was, by Struve, “strongly suspected.” Positive assurances of the sciences—they are islands of seeming stability in a cosmic jelly. We shall eclipse the story of Algol with some modem disclosures. In all minds not convinced that earnest and devoted falsifiers are holding back Development, the story, if remembered at all, will soon renew its fictitious lustre. We are centers of tremors in a quaking black jelly. A bright and shining delusion looks like beaconed security.
Sir Robert Ball, in the Story of the Heavens, says that the period in which Algol blinks his magnitudes is 2 days, 20 hours, 48 minutes, and 55 seconds. He gives the details of Prof. Vogel’s calculations upon a speck of light and an invisibility. It is a god-like command that out of the variations of light shall come the diameters of faint appearances and the distance and velocity of the unseeable—that the diameter of the point of light is 1,054,000 miles, and that the diameter of the imperceptibility is 825,000 miles, and that their centers are 3,220,000 miles apart: orbital velocity of Algol, 26 miles a second, and the orbital velocity of the companion, 55 miles a second—should be stated 26.3 miles and 55.4 miles a second (Proctor, Old and New Astronomy, p. 773).
