Le Soleil by Angelo Secchi

Le Soleil by Angelo Secchi - 1875

Here is a copy of Angelo Secchi's "Le Soleil" that consists of a two volume book on his solar research and an atlas of the solar spectrum. I am missing the first volume of the solar researches. The second volume that I have is in two parts. The first part was published in 1875, and the second part was published in 1877. The atlas was published in 1875. The first part concentrates on the Sun while the second part continues with the Sun and covers the solar system and stellar astronomy. Part one has a series of wonderful solar prominence drawings made by Angelo Secchi using a special spectroscope (high dispersion, double pass instruments that employ five or more prisms) and technique that was independently developed by Norman Lockyer and Jules Jenssen in 1868 in which a spectroscope slit is centered on the edge of the Sun where the chromosphere is located. If you read the biography of Secchi on Wikipedia it states that he was the inventor of the heliospectrograph, which is not true. I am not sure if the author of that Wikipedia article was referring to the spectroscope that Secchi used as a heliospectroscope or if they confused it with the spectroheliograph invented by George Ellery Hale. The same Wikipedia article falsely claims that Secchi also invented the stellar spectroscope. Wikipedia articles need to have appropriate references. The statements that I saw that were false were not backed up by any references. The second part of volume two starts with two very nice plates of nebular drawings. It continues with a couple of chapters on the Sun. It includes a chapter on the transits of Venus, chapters on the planets, a chapter on comets, and a chapter on stellar spectroscopy that includes two color plates of stellar spectra. Angelo Secchi was a Catholic priest and astronomer from Italy that was a pioneer in astronomical spectroscopy. He developed a system of stellar spectral classification based on five different spectral types (Secchi classes) that was a forerunner to the Henry Draper spectral classification system developed by Edward Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory.