M&D p 6: the Distance to a Star

[Monte Davis]

"...for the Times are as impossible to calculate, this Advent, as the
Distance to a Star."

That's a loaded simile for 18th-century astronomy, especially with the many
references coming up to Mason's boss, Astronomer Royal James Bradley.
Bradley had attempted unsuccessfully in the 1720s  to determine the
distance to a star by stellar parallax: the change in its position between
Obs six months and ~185 million miles apart, as the earth moves halfway
around its orbit. But the angle was too small to detect with the
instruments of the time; Bessel would succeed in 1838. (Parallax ->
distance measurements within our solar system were easier, cf. p. 93.)

I wouldn't put it past Pynchon to have in mind a later echo, beloved of
astronomers and triumphalist historians of science. In 1835 sociologist and
philosopher Auguste Comte wrote that "we would never know how to
investigate by any means [the stars'] chemical composition... every notion
of the true mean temperatures of the stars will necessarily always be
concealed from us." Unknown to Comte, Fraunhofer had already described the
bright and dark lines in the spectra of the Sun and a few bright stars.
Kirchhoff, Bunsen and others would identify the lines with incandescent
elements, letting us determine both composition and temperature (as well as
crucial foundation ideas and data for quantum theory).
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