Re: SETI public: A Question Concerning Lowell's Alleged 1907 Photographs of the

From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Wed Jul 30 2003 - 09:51:28 PDT

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    Hi Alex,

    Can you get a copy of Lowell and Mars, by William Graves Hoyt, University of
    Arizona Press, Tucson, 1976 (reprinted 1996):
    http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/bid691.htm
    The images you seek are on pages 192-193. Regarding the canals, if there
    are any depicted in those 20 images they display, then they must be pretty
    small. I highly recommend this book.

    Lowell's first book on Mars, published in 1895, is available online here:

    http://www.wanderer.org/references/lowell/Mars/

    It has plenty of his drawings of the Red Planet as he saw it in 1894.

    Larry

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: Alex Michael Bonnici
    Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 10:18 PM
    To: setipublic; Project Orion
    Subject: SETI public: A Question Concerning Lowell's Alleged 1907 Photographs of the Martian Canals

    Hello Gang,
                    Currently I am involved in a series of public education
    activities that will be organised in late August in connection to the
    upcoming Mars Opposition. I will be giving the first of a series of
    public lectures concerning Mars. The first lecture is entitled “Lowell
    and the Martian Canal Saga”. This has always been a favourite topic of
    mine. When I was teaching High School Physics and Astronomy in the
    United States I repeated astronomer Edward Walter Maunder’s experiment
    “School Boy” experiment and got some interesting results that the
    Martian canals were an optical illusion.

    In my research I keep coming across references that claim that the
    Martian Canals were photographed.

    One case in point being the following quote from a pseudo scientific web
    site:

    http://www.goddardmultimedia.fsnet.co.uk/atpai/canals.htm

    “Lowell made a special expedition to Chile in 1907 and obtained the
    first photographic evidence of the canals. His successor Dr. E.C.
    Slipher had better success in later years with observations from South
    Africa, when camera equipment had improved considerably. The Martian
    canals are seen on plates VI and XLVII in the book, The Photographic
    Story of Mars, by E.C. Slipher. The edition I
    obtained was published by Northland Press, Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1962.

    Mention of the alleged 1907 photographs is also made in Chapter 8
    (http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/online.bks/mars/chap08.htm) of The
    Planet Mars:
    A History of Observation and Discovery by William Sheehan the University
    of Arizona Press, Tucson Copyright © 1996

    Does anyone have copies of these Alleged photographs that they can send
    me via e-mail or the URL of any online web page that has these
    photographs? Also is it true that some people claim to have captured the
    canals on CCD images? Please provide references.

    I beforehand thank you for your help,

    Yours truly,

    Alex Michael Bonnici


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