[4] His independently organised, and conducted, expedition to Jeur, in western India, to observe the solar chromosphere and corona, during the 1898 eclipse, broke a psychological barrier to the entry of Indian scientists to the study of astronomy.
His spectroscopic observations of the Orion Nebula, using several spectroscopes and the 161⁄2-inch Grubb telescope at several magnifications, showed that its green nebular line is sharp, symmetrical, and narrow, and not "fluted", thus refuting Norman Lockyer's "meteoric hypothesis" of the nebulae, according to which the spectrographic lines arise from the collisional heat of the meteoric particles, and require the nebular line to be fluted (extended or shaded like molecular bands–the likely molecular band at this wavelength being that of MgO).
Before Naegamvala's observations, others—notably Huggins, Vogeland, and James Keeler at Lick—showed the lines to be sharp, but there was still a major controversy.
Naegamvala of Poonah, India, who had been observing the Orion nebula with his 16½-inch telescope and three prism spectroscope and found that the chief nebular line was sharp under all circumstances, and therefore not the remnant of magnesium fluting, as Lockyer had suggested.
Captain William Noble, a friend and partisan of Huggins, rose and smoothly congratulated Naegamvala, through the Secretary who had read the paper.