Unravelling Starlight

In ‘The new astronomy’ Huggins tells us: ‘I was fortunate in the early autumn of the … year, 1864, to begin some observations in a region hitherto unexplored’ namely, the nebulae. He could indeed feel ‘fortunate’ to have turned his spectroscope on this class of celestial objects. They are among the faintest on the sky. It had been over thirty years since he caught his first glimpse of a nebula's spectrum. Even so, Huggins recounted the experience in riveting detail as if it were only yesterday. Readers could only imagine the diligent care with which he must have recorded the event in real time.

In 1914, Huggins's widow, Margaret, shipped six bound notebooks containing the records of nearly a half century of work done at their Tulse Hill observatory off to Wellesley College near Boston, Massachusetts. When the notebooks arrived at the private school for women, Professor of Astronomy Sarah Frances Whiting (1846–1927) was the first to examine them. She found what she believed to be the notes from his early observations of nebular spectra. ‘In 1864’, she wrote, ‘[Huggins] records his observations of the green lines in the nebulae, and scores of nights were spent trying to match these lines with magnesium, lead, iron, what-not.’ Entries fitting Whiting's description can be found in Notebook 1. However, they are clearly dated 1889 and 1890, and they are written in Margaret Huggins's hand.