Eclipse observers often face unexpected difficulties, sometimes on their way to their chosen sites and sometimes at a site itself.
Among the more interesting challenges are those that tested 19th-century French astronomer Jules Janssen.
Puzzled by Mysteries
Janssen was 35 years old when he turned his attention to the mysteries of the Sun. He had many questions. Among them were: What precisely was Earth’s star made of? and What caused it to give off certain rays? Janssen did much of his work from observatories using a spectroscope that he constructed. This device can determine what things are made of. It works by spreading out light into the rainbow of colors. Many spectroscopes make that rainbow by passing the light through a prism .Since gases of different elements make or take up different precise colors, studying the bright or dark lines we see in the spectroscope enables us to identify elements even as far away as the stars.
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