Ancient Persians called the biggest one Al Bakr, or the White Ox. Europeans were introduced to the “two clouds of mist” from accounts of the first circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan and his crew in the early sixteenth century. And so the hazy pair came to be named in honor of the Portuguese-born explorer. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are each a chaotic collection of stars, richly diffused with glowing gas. Such novel and fascinating sights were a compelling reason for European and American astronomers to set up observatories in the southern hemisphere. The Harvard College Observatory did just that in the 1890s, when it established a southern station in the highlands of Peru, just above the town of Arequipa. Before this, for more than a decade, Harvard had been carrying out a formidable task: to catalog every star in the northern sky and accurately gauge its color and brightness. Presented with a sizable endowment for a program in spectroscopy, observatory director Edward C.
What do You think about The Day We Found The Universe?
