Dear Harrow,
Your plate is fogged at the edge but otherwise perfectly serviceable. I can find no fault in the clock drive sufficient to account for the displacement you describe.
Yours, C. Vale
Private correspondence · 1908-1911
Letters concerning the incorrect sky
Five letters survived with the plate archive. The first three appear administrative. The last two do not.
Harrow,
The southern object is the greater difficulty. I have checked the observatory latitude against the survey record. If the date is correct, you did not photograph that sky from that instrument.
I suggest we call this a labelling error and proceed no further.
Vale,
It is not a labelling error. I repeated the exposure with a fresh plate and obtained the same field. I then covered the objective and obtained, of course, nothing.
The impossible stars require the telescope.
Harrow,
Do not correct the negative parallax. Do not reduce Plate 17 against any catalogue produced after August. Do not publish the geometry.
Most importantly, do not ask why the coordinate repeats. A coordinate is an answer to the question “where?”. You may have discovered that it can answer another question.
C.V.
There is no object at the centre of the figure.
The centre is the observer.