Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 69.djvu/329

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The Effective Temperature of the Sun.
313

For the details of the apparatus and the complete method of reduc- tion of the observations, the original memoir in the ' Phil. Trans.' may be referred to.

In order to protect the incandescent strip from draughts of air it was covered with a water-jacket of gilded brass. This was provided with a circular hole in one of its longer sides, through which its radiation could reach the aperture of the radio-micrometer. The internal walls of this water-jacket being highly polished,it has occurred to me, since the publication of the memoir referred to, that possibly some of the radiation from distant parts of the platinum strip may have been reflected backwards and forwards from the^polished walls and the strip itself, ultimately escaping through the aperture and reaching the radio-micrometer, thus increasing the amount of radiation which should have reached it directly from the strip alone.

In order to test this surmise I first took a number of readings at known temperatures with the walls of the water-jacket polished as