Caption: RECORDED LIGHT
William Huggins sketched the emission lines he detected in NGC 6543 with his 8-inch Clark refractor and visual spectroscope.
LIVERPOOL-born
William Huggins (1820-1884), with Stubbs and Augustus John, is among the best and, arguably, the most original animal painter of the Victorian era.
GALILEO GALILEI, Isaac Newton, William Herschel,
William Huggins, George Ellery Hale, Arthur Eddington, Harlow Shapley, and Edwin Hubble are all nicely profiled in this volume subtitled "The Astro-Physicists." In sprightly prose, often interlaced with quotes, Ian Glass weaves together these eight lives (warts and all) and their scientific careers.
William Huggins (1822-84), Liverpool-born, made his reputation as a painter of animals, partly following in the tradition of Stubbs (but without the anatomy work).
(A more powerful tool for categorizing nebulae was forged in August 1864 when English amateur
William Huggins observed the spectrum of the planetary NGC 6543 in Draco and realized that its light originated from a tenuous gas rather than from a mass of unresolved stars.) Many of Herschel's planetaries turned out to be other types of objects, mostly galaxies, while some entries in his other classes were later shown to be planetaries.
After learning of Bunsen and Kirchhoff's work in 1862, self-taught amateur astronomer
William Huggins, at Upper Tulse Hill outside London, set his sights--and a spectroscope --on the wider universe.
In 1864 English amateur astronomer
William Huggins examined NGC 6543 with a spectroscope.
Kirchhoff detected sodium in the outer atmosphere of the Sun, and a mere three years after that British astronomer
William Huggins used spectroscopy to determine that many of the same elements present on Earth also exist in the stars.