c star, and it is so still in the very same spot. As this star
did not reach the first or second magnitude it would probably have
escaped notice altogether if Schmidt had not happened to look at the
Swan on that particular evening.

We are not so likely to miss seeing a new star since astronomers have
pressed the photographic camera into their service. This became evident
in 1892, when the last conspicuous temporary star appeared in Auriga. On
the 24th January, Dr. Anderson, an astronomer in Edinburgh, noticed a
yellowish star of the fifth magnitude in the constellation Auriga, and a
week later, when he had compared a star-map with the heavens and made
sure that the object was really a new star, he made his discovery
public. In the case of this star we are able to fix fairly closely the
moment when it first blazed out. In the course of the regular
photographic survey of the heavens undertaken at the Harvard College
Observatory (Cambridge, Massachusetts) the region of the sky where the
new star appeared had been photographed on thirteen nights from October
21st to December 1st, 1891, and on twelve nights from December 10th to
January 20th, 1892. On the first series of plates there was no trace of
the Nova, while it was visible on the very first plate of the second
series as a star of the fifth magnitude. Fortunately it turned out that
Professor Max Wolf of Heidelberg, a most successful celestial
photographer, had photographed the same region on the 8th December, and
this photograph does not show the star, so that it cannot on that night
have been as bright as the ninth magnitude. Nova Auriga must therefore
have flared up suddenly between the 8th and the 10th of December.
According to the Harvard photographs, the first maximum of brightness
occurred about the 20th of December, when the magnitude was 4-1/2. The
decrease of the brightness was very irregular; the star fluctuated for
the five weeks following the first of February between the fourth and
the sixth magnitude, but after the beginning of March, 1892, the
brightness declined very rapidly, and at the end of April the star was
seen as an exceedingly faint one (sixteenth magnitude) with the great
Lick Refractor. When this mighty instrument was again pointed to the
Nova in the following August, it had risen nearly to the tenth
magnitude, after which it gradually became extremely faint again, and is
so still.

The temporary and the variable stars form but a very small