Thomas Wright of Durham, a navigation instrument maker, is credited (albeit somewhat erroneously) with explaining the luminescence of the Milky Way along a band of the sky as looking through a large layer of stars end on. Shown here is Plate XXVII from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe 1750 in which he actually attributes the effect to looking approximately tangential to a spherical shell of stars distributed uniformly about a central divine center of universal order. Appendix A gives the text that accompanied this and its preceding figure.
|
wright
Figure 3 Wright's starry spheres |  |
