Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Cape Catalogue of 1159 Stars, Deduced From Observations at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, 1856 to 1861, Reduced to the Epoch 1860
The Right Ascensions of those Stars which have been used for clock error can do little more than reproduce the assumed tabular places em ployed in the reductions, and the Right Ascensions of other Stars not further from the Equator than those of the usual clock-star list can never differ much from the results of the Northern Observatories.
The North Polar Distances of the same well-observed Stars can now be of little value. The results are not likely to be compared with those of the Northern Observatories for a discussion of the errors of the refraction tables when results made with more powerful instruments are available.
I have made these remarks, not only in justice to the present stafi', and to explain the work upon which they have been employed, but because it was these considerations which led me to pass over the earlier observations, and to commence the systematic reductions with the year 1856, when the Transit Circle was first brought into regular use. I felt that these reductions Could not be any longer delayed without the value of the results being greatly diminished. I had, and still have, hopes, that the data collected in the present Catalogue for corresponding observations at the Northern Observatories would be found sufficient to meet the actual requirements of Astronomers, so far as these requirements can be met by the material collected here, and that I might be relieved from the laborious and somewhat useless task of completing the reductions of the earlier observations of Stars whose positions have been fixed already with an accuracy greater than could be expected to be attained in the observations made with the, comparatively speaking, inferior instruments in use at this Observatory before the introduction of the Transit Circle.
The present Catalogue has been formed from the volumes of results of observations made at this Observatory in the years 18 56, 1857, 1858, 1859, and 1860, the reductions for which have been completed and the results published since I took charge of the Observatory work in October, 1870. The observations of Stars near the South Pole observed in 1861 have also been included. The whole of the observations combined for the formation of this Catalogue were made with the Transit Circle, an instrument similar in all respects to the Greenwich instrument which has been in use since 1851. The results of the observations made at Greenwich, 1854 to 1860, have been formed into a Catalogue reduced to the epoch 1860. There exist two other Catalogues, of great value, reduced to the same epoch. January 1, 1860, has therefore been chosen as the epoch of the present Catalogue. This choice of epoch affords great facilities for a comparison between the Greenwich and Cape results, and also for the formation of a more general Catalogue, for the whole heavens, by the combination of the different Catalogues reduced to that epoch.
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