Word: saturn
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Indignant snorts on behalf of two amateur astronomers went up in London and in Potsdam as the ringed planet Saturn last week placidly continued to whirl in & out of Earthling's sight the great spot which last fortnight erupted on its protuberant belly (TIME, Aug. 14). Washington's Naval Observatory, their snorts made it appear, had not kept the spot under observation for a seemly length of time after Astronomer John Edwin Willis sighted it. The British Astronomical Association said that one Will Hay, music-hall comedian and amateur stargazer, had spotted the spot 26 hours before Astronomer...
...spot was observed to rotate precisely in the schedule determined for the planet by the late Professor Asaph Hall (10 hr. 14 min. 24 sec.), it could not be a drifting cloud, might be a volcanic eruption in a fixed area. To still others a volcano on cold Saturn seemed hardly more imaginable than spontaneous combustion in a snowball.* Still an enigma is Saturn's canker...
...Recent measurements at Mt. Wilson put Saturn's surface temperature at about 750° below zero centigrade...
...midriff of yellow Saturn, behind its girdle of rings, an immense, glaring white sore, about 7,000 miles across, broke out last week. First to see it was Astronomer John Edwin Willis at the Naval Observatory in Washington. Although it was after midnight, he routed out the observatory's superintendent, who flashed the news to Harvard Observatory, whence it was relayed to observatories the world over. White spots have been descried on Saturn before, one on the equator in 1876, several in the northern hemisphere in 1903. Astronomers could not find out what produced them. Last week every device...
...Saturn is comparatively difficult to observe because it, least dense of the solar system's planets, has a vaporous, clouded surface, and because its rapid rotation (roughly once every ten hours) wheels surface phenomena quickly out of sight...