illegible note

Actually, what it says is "Aug. so hot in Wash. D.C."   My novel opens with Asaph Hall's discovery of the martian moon Phobos, around 4 in the morning on August 18, 1877.  So I unleashed Google, but alas.  Here's what my own diary says:

I spent a couple of hours this morning, 4:40 to 6:30, working on background stuff for the novel.  It turns out that finding out the temperature in Washington at four in the morning, 18 August 1877, is not a simple Google . . . the free information only goes back to 1900.  (There's a form to fill out to get a copy of the Washington newspaper that day.)  I'll have to go down to the library and look it up on microform records.  Or pay someone to do it, which I resist.

In 1909, the low on that morning was about 50; in 1902, it was 60.  It makes a difference in what Asaph is wearing when he makes the observation in the drafty observatory dome.
 
Posed pictures of astronomers "working" at that time always have them in coat and tie, but I suspect they didn't dress up in the absence of photographers.  And the weather was changing fast along the East Coast in that time, with growing industrialization based on coal.
 
I did come up with a composite of what the novel's main character, Asafa ("Asa"), will look like.  I went through hundreds of actors' casting-call photos for female mixed-race faces around thirty years old.  Now I'll take pencil in hand and draw her.  Be living with her for a year.

Joe