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Star (Christchurch), Issue 18182, 15 June 1927, Page 6

During the course of a lecture on celestial photography given by Dr D. 13. M’Leod at Canterbury College last evening the speaker stated that to the naked eye about 5000 stars were visible. 1 "With a one-inch telescope 100,000 were visible, with a ten-inch telescope 5,000,000 and with a hundred-inch telescope 100,000,000. It had been estimated that the total number of stars, so far as could humanly be ascertained, was 1,500.000,000. The first celestial photographs were taken in 1850 by a man named Bond, of Cambridge, U.S.A. Then, added Dr M’Leod, came Rutherford (not Sir Ernest), who took a series of photographs, but it was in 3852 that the first systematic scheme was begun. In 1884 Sir David Gill showed the possibilities of photographing the sky, and a beginning was made and in 1887 a scheme was formulated to photograph the whole sky, but that had not yet b?en brought to comple-