A look at Burnham's Celestial Handbook and Lowell Observatory.

 To set the scene these are Burnham's comments on amateur astronomers from the book

The front cover of Volume 1 of 3

 A brief video about the Celestial Handboo

The reasoning behind the creation of the book - courtesy of the New York Village voice

This is Robert Burnham Jnr.

The first page

This explains how Burnham obtained the images for the book from the plate collection,and no doubt much of the reference information - from the Lowell Observatory Library in Arizona. I visited the observatory on the same road trip that I happened to come across the books for sale in Colorado. When Burnham had to leave Lowell at the end of the project he was working on - he was offered the job of janitor - which he turned down.

Many of the images in the book were taken with the 13 inch Pluto discovery telescope. It is an "astrograph" - specifically designed for photography with images being captured on a sensitised glass plate which is 17 inches by 14 inches - the telescope itself consisting of three 13 inch lenses. Exposure time was about 60 minutes per image.

Courtesy of Lowell Observatory

Whereas I use software to blink between two images of the same field of view on two different exposures Lowell Observatory has a mechanical blink comparator to do the same thing with two glass plates. I remember trying to get a decent photograph of this comparator in the observatory museum and failing - but I do have the efforts stored somewhere.

Blink Comparator

The contents from Volume 1

 This is a typical image from the book (NGC 4565) taken with the 13 inch telescope.

He also incudes an image of the same galaxy taken with the Mt Palomar 200 inch telescope

This is my own image of the same galaxy using my C14 - remarkably similar to the Mt Palomar image.

 At the end of Volume three Burnham lists the Messier objects with page references to their description in the book - a very useful reference! Here is part of it.