THE LARGEST TELESCOPE.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 80, 6 April 1926, Page 5

THE LARGEST TELESCOPE.

(From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, March 10,

According to a telegram received in San Francisco the "Brooklyn Daily Eagle" received a dispatch saying a telescope more than twice as large as any in existence is being built by Professor George Willis Ritchey, the noted astronomer, in Paris.

With it Professor Ritchey hopes t< observe stars 15,000 times more distant than any at present visible through th< largest "instruments. Through it thi moon would appear only ten miles away and the observable universe would be in creased 1,500,000 times in volume, hi estimates. The new reflector is to be 19 feet i inches in diameter. It is almost readj for the critical baking process, upoi which its success is expected to depend and it will be finished during the summer if all goes smoothly. Professor Ritchey was superintended of instrument construction at the sola observatory at the Carnegie Institute a Pasadena, California. It had been be lieved by scientists that thee limit of siz of telescope construction had beei reached because of the differences of ex pansion and contraction of the parts o a large, solid reflect mirror. In the nev parabolic mirror Professor Ttitchey be lieves he has overcome this difficulty b; making the mirror in cells, resemblin; those of a honeycomb. Nearly twenty years of research ii the "rare earth" group of the chemical field finally has resulted in the discovery of one of the five unknown, but supposedly existent elements which make up all known compounds. The discovery, the first ever made in America, was announced by the University of Illinois at Urbana as the work of Dr. B. S. Hopkins, president of Inorganic Chemistry, assisted by L. F. Lyntema and J. A. Harris, of the chemistry staff.