Talk:William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.

Biography Portal

Start

This article has been rated as Start-Class on the Project's quality scale. [FAQ]
(If you rated the article, please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)

This article is supported by the Politics and government work group.

This article is supported by WikiProject Peerage.

This article is supported by the Science and academia work group.

An appropriate infobox may need to be added to this article, or the current infobox may need to be updated. Please refer to the list of biography infoboxes for further information.

[edit] Types of Nebulae and the significance of Rosse's observations

Sorry for poor, sketchy English and lack of references, I'm quite tired.

The nature of nebulae was not known in Rosse's time. Galaxies and galactic and extra-galactic gas clouds were not well distinguished. It was not until he made his observations with the telescope he made (the largest in the world until 1917 when the American 100 inch ??? telescope was built) that "spiral nebulae", as they were at first called, were known about. To put this in context: it was not well determined that anything existed outside our own galaxy due to the limitations of contemporary methods of measurement using parallax of stars, and prevailing opinion was that we were near the centre of the galaxy.

"resolvable" and "irresolvable" nebulae of Hershel.

Mr. Jones 18:01, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)