Word: menzel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...best part of the afternoon came at the University Observatory, when they showed the movies. Professor Donald H. Menzel narrated a torrid little epic about the adventures of some gas on the sun, while the tired Pandit's eyes dropped. At the end of the ten-minute film, Menzel exclaimed that he "could show five hours more without repeating," but he later made up for the faux pas by turning the best phrase of the afternoon: "Here's one thing where international cooperation helps. We'd like to photograph the sun all the time. That's something no one nation...
...book, Our Sun (Blakiston; $4.50), Dr. Donald H. Menzel of Harvard tells how new and refined instruments have opened the sun to astronomers' prying eyes. There is plenty of action to watch, for the sun is a vast turmoil of violent storms and convulsions...
...recently been improved to the point where it can take motion pictures (spectroheliokinemato-grams) which show the sun covered with patches, streaks and mottlings, most of them in motion. The pattern of the mottled background often changes completely in 15 minutes. "Motion pictures of the surface," says Dr. Menzel, "present a sort of 'crawly' appearance-like white worms in a pile of carrion...
...Menzel, whose thermometers must reach 93,000,000 miles, seems to have the tougher job. The temperature of the sun is 6000 Centigrade, but the temperature of the corona, which the naked eye can see only during total eclipses, appears to be 1,000,000. That's what Menzel is trying to explain, but it's only one of his worries...
...solve all this, Menzel directs a cone-roofed observatory in Colorado, and a new station in New Mexico, close to the site of the first atom bomb. The observatories are equipped with spectrohelioscopes-- astronomical X-ray machines that penetrate to the inner layers of the sun--and with coronoscopes, which blot out the sun like an eclipse, so that the other corona can be watched. Menzel went west a few months ago to spend all his time at the solar stations, on the Astronomy Department's biggest project...