This article is interesting for a number of reasons. One of the most interesting is that M.L Humasen was a high-school dropout who got a job as a janitor at Mt. Wilson Observatory where the was later made a member of the astronomical staff . He went on to take many of the observation that Edwin Hubble used to formulate Hubble’s Law. It’s odd that in the interview Humasen says he doesn’t believe the universe is “blowing up” which is precisely what Hubble’s Law says, though a bit less dramatically.

I’m a little confused about calling the object a star. N.G.C 4800 is actually a galaxy. Hubble was the one who proved, in the early 1920′s that these distant objects were outside the Milky Way and were in fact galaxies. Since they also refer to it as a nebula (which was sort of a catch-all term for blurry stellar objects at the time) I’m going to guess that it was just the reporter who decided it was a star.

I don’t know enough about solar spectra to be sure, but it seems like you wouldn’t be able to make a direct comparison of the spectra from a whole galaxy to that of one star. Incidentally N.G.C 4800 is actually 97.14 million light years away not the 50 million the article states.

Photographs STAR Moving 4800 MILES A SECOND

Sitting with his eye glued to a telescopic camera for 45 hours, M. L. Humason, Mt. Wilson astronomer, has succeeded in setting a record for long distance photographs. The nebula on which he trained his camera is 50,000,000 light years away from the earth.

FOR 45 hours in total darkness, Milton L. Humason, member of the astronomical staff at the Mt. Wilson observatory at Pasadena, California, trained the world’s largest telescope toward a far distant point in the heavens and obtained a photograph of a nebula 50,000,000 light years away from the earth—a total of 300 quintillion miles.