INSTALL PATROL STATION FOR THE SOUTHERN SKY

A new astronomical station of the Harvard Observatory, equipped with two photographic telescopes, has just been installed on the edge of the nitrate desert of Northern Chile to test the atmospheric conditions in that locality, and to watch and photograph the southern stars that cannot be studied at the existing stations of the Observatory located at Cambridge, at Mandeville, Jamaica, and at Arequipa, Peru.

For more than thirty years the University has maintained a southern station in order that its series of celestial photographs might cover the whole sky. After the investigation of 1889 of various sites in Peru and Chile, the branch observatory was located in the Andes Mountains near Arequipa, at an altitude of eight thousand feet. Throughout a large part of the year the astronomical conditions in this high altitude are excellent, and the astronomers working at Arequipa have secured more than a hundred thousand photographs of southern stars. During the Peruvian summer; however, in the months from December to March, a heavily clouded season prevails. The continuity of the photographic record is then so badly interrupted that it has now been decided to test other sites in the hope of finding a favorable place that may be occupied during the cloudy season at Arequipa.

Located in Rainless Region

The new Harvard Observatory has been located at Chuquicamata, Chile, about twenty miles from the Smithsonian station, and at an altitude of between seven and eight thousand feet. The region is practically rainless, and the available records indicate long seasons of cloudless skies.

A ten-inch photographic telescope is being used for the study of variable stars in the southern Milky Way, and in the Magellanic Clouds. A special telescope with wide-angle lens carries on the photographic patrol of the whole southern sky--an investigation long maintained by the University in order to have a continuous record of the variations or of any unusual behavior of the brighter stars.