The flight of the moon's shadow was, on August 9, 1896, dogged by atrocious weather. It traversed, besides, some of the most inhospitable regions on the earth's surface, and afforded, at the best, but a brief interval of obscurity. At Novaya Zemlya, however, of all places, the conditions were tolerably favourable, and, as we have seen, the trophy of a "flash-spectrograph" was carried off. Some coronal photographs, moreover, taken by the late Sir George Baden-Powell[574] and by M. Hansky, a member of a Russian party, were marked by features of considerable interest. They made apparent a close connection between coronal outflows and chromospheric jets, cone-shaped beams serving as the sheaths, or envelopes, of prominences. M. Hansky,[575] indeed, thought that every streamer had a chromospheric eruption at its base. Further, dark veinings of singular shapes unmistakably interrupted the coronal light, and bordered brilliant prominences,[576] reminding us of certain "black lines" traced by Swift across the "anvil protuberance" August 7, 1869.[577] In type the corona of 1896 reproduced that of 1886, as befitted its intermediate position in the solar cycle.
The eclipse-track on January 22, 1898, crossed the Indian peninsula from Viziadrug, on the Malabar coast, to Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Not a cloud obstructed the view anywhere, and an unprecedented harvest of photographic records was garnered. The flash-spectrum, in its successive phases, appeared on plates taken by Sir Norman Lockyer, Mr. Evershed, Professor Campbell,[578] and others; Professor Turner[579] set on foot a novel mode of research by picturing the corona in the polarised ingredient of its light; Mrs. Maunder[580] practically solved the problem of photographing the faint coronal extensions, one ray on her plates running out to nearly six diameters from the moon's limb. Yet she used a Dallmeyer lens of only one and a half inches aperture. Her success accorded perfectly with Professor Wadsworth's conclusion that effectiveness in delineation by slight contrasts of luminosity varies inversely with aperture. Triple-coated plates, and a comparatively long exposure of twenty seconds, contributed to a result unlikely, for some time, to be surpassed. The corona of 1898 presented a mixed aspect. The polar plumes due at minimum were combined in it with the quadrilateral ogives belonging to spot-maxima. A slow course of transformation, in fact, seemed in progress; and it was found to be completed in 1900, when the eclipse of May 28 revealed the typical halo of a quiescent sun.