Professor Shapley, the Director of the Harvard Observatory, who has long University Theatre--"The Awakening" recognized the importance of the variable stars in the study of cosmogony, has laid out an ambitious program for their discovery and investigation. For this purpose, the Milky Way is divided into 240 fields, which are now being examined by a corps of observers, available through an appropriation from the Milton fund.

Perhaps the quickest and most successful way to discover variable or new stars is the simple method of superposing two glass photographs of the same celestial region, taken on different nights. One of the photographs should be negative, on which the stars are black, and the other a positive on which they are white.

Milky Way Yields Finds

By such methods, about a thousand new variable stars have already been found in these Milky Way regions, mainly by Misses Boyd, Mohr, Swope, and Woods. Nearly all of these variables are very faint, and are situated at great distances.

The determination by Miss Swope of the brightness and the period of variation of eighty-five of the variables discovered by her has enabled Dr. Shapley to locate more accurately the center or nucleus of our Galactic universe, 50,000 light years away. This center of our universe is in the Sagittarius-Scorpio region, the brightest part of the Milky Way, which is visible here in the summer sky but too low in the south to be seen in all its glory. In Arequipa, Peru, the region is overhead and is truly a remarkable sight in that transparent atmosphere.

Hardly any story of science has a more romantic appeal than that of the spectra of the stars.

Spectra Spectacular

By means of a prism placed over the object glass of the telescope, photographs of stellar spectra have been taken at Harvard for the last forty years. The light of any star of sufficient brightness in the field of view is spread out into a band, showing characteristics by which the spectra can be classified into various groups.