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or the one by Nasmyth and Carpenter. few words must suffice. Mountain ranges like our Andes or Himalayas are rare. Instead of that, we see an immense number of circular cavities, with rugged edges and flat interior, often with a cone in the centre, reminding one of instantaneous photographs of the splash of a drop of water falling into a pool. Many of these are fifty or sixty miles across, some more. They are generally spoken of as resembling craters of volcanoes, active or extinct, on the earth. But some of those who have most fully studied the shapes of craters deny altogether their resemblance to the circular objects on the moon. These so-called craters, in many parts, are seen to be closely grouped, especially in the snowwhite parts of the moon. But there are great smooth dark spaces, like the clear black ice on a pond, more free from craters, to which the equally inappropriate name of seas has been given. The most conspicuous crater, Tycho, is near the south pole. At full moon there are seen to radiate from Tycho numerous streaks of light, or "rays," cutting through all the mountain formations, and extending over fully half the lunar disc, like the star-shaped cracks made on a sheet of ice by a blow. Similar cracks radiate

from other large craters. It must be mentioned that these white rays are well seen only in full light of the sun at full moon, just as the white

snow in the crevasses of a glacier is seen bright from a distance only when the sun is high, and disappears at sunset. Then there are deep, narrow, crooked "rills" which may have been water-courses; also " 'clefts" about half a mile wide, and often hundreds of miles long, like deep cracks in the surface going straight through mountain and valley.

The moon shares with the sun the advantage of being a good subject for photography, though the planets are not. This is owing to her larger apparent size, and the abundance of illumination. The consequence is that the finest details of the moon, as seen in the largest telescope in the world, may be reproduced at a cost within the reach of all.

No certain changes have ever been observed; but several suspicions have been expressed, especially as to the small crater Linné, in the Mare Serenitatis. It is now generally agreed that no certainty can be expected from drawings, and that for real evidence we must await the verdict of photography.

No trace of water or of an atmosphere has been found on the moon. It is possible that the temperature is too low. In any case, no displacement of a star by atmospheric refraction at occultation has been surely recorded. The moon seems to be dead.

The distance of the moon from the earth is just

The base

now the subject of re-measurement. line is from Greenwich to Cape of Good Hope, and the new feature introduced is the selection of a definite point on a crater (Mösting A), instead of the moon's edge, as the point whose distance is to be measured.

The Inferior Planets. When the telescope was invented, the phases of Venus attracted much attention; but the brightness of this planet, and her proximity to the sun, as with Mercury also, seemed to be a bar to the discovery of markings by which the axis and period of rotation could be fixed. Cassini gave the rotation as twenty-three hours, by observing a bright spot on her surface. Schröter made it 23h. 21m. 195. This value was supported by others. In 1890 Schiaparelli' announced that Venus rotates, like our moon, once in one of her revolutions, and always directs the same face to the sun. This property has also been ascribed to Mercury; but in neither case has the evidence been generally accepted. Twenty-four hours is probably about the period of rotation for each of these planets.

Several observers have claimed to have seen a planet within the orbit of Mercury, either in transit over the sun's surface or during an eclipse. It has even been named Vulcan. These announcements would have received little attention but for the fact that the motion of Mercury

1 Astr. Nach., 2,944.

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has irregularities which have not been accounted for by known planets; and Le Verrier 1 has stated that an intra-Mercurial planet or ring of asteroids would account for the unexplained part of the motion of the line of apses of Mercury's orbit amounting to 38" per century.

Mars. The first study of the appearance of Mars by Miraldi led him to believe that there were changes proceeding in the two white caps which are seen at the planet's poles. W. Herschel attributed these caps to ice and snow, and the dates of his observations indicated a melting of these ice-caps in the Martian summer.

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Schröter attributed the other markings on Mars to drifting clouds. But Beer and Mädler, in 1830-39, identified the same dark spots as being always in the same place, though sometimes blurred by mist in the local winter. spot sketched by Huyghens in 1672, one frequently seen by W. Herschel in 1783, another by Arago in 1813, and nearly all the markings recorded by Beer and Mädler in 1830, were seen and drawn by F. Kaiser in Leyden during seventeen nights of the opposition of 1862 (Ast. Nacht., No. 1,468), whence he deduced the period of rotation to be 24h. 37m. 22S., 62 or one-tenth of a second less than the period deduced by R. A. Proctor from a drawing by Hooke in 1666.

It must be noted that, if the periods of rota

1 Acad. des Sc., Paris; C. R., lxxxiii., 1876.

tion both of Mercury and Venus be about twenty-four hours, as seems probable, all the four planets nearest to the sun rotate in the same period, while the great planets rotate in about ten hours (Uranus and Neptune being still indeterminate).

The general surface of Mars is a deep yellow; but there are dark grey or greenish patches. Sir John Herschel was the first to attribute the ruddy colour of Mars to its soil rather than to its atmosphere.

The observations of that keen-sighted observer Dawes led to the first good map of Mars, in 1869. In the 1877 opposition Schiaparelli revived interest in the planet by the discovery of canals, uniformly about sixty miles wide, running generally on great circles, some of them being three or four thousand miles long. During the opposition of 1881-2 the same observer re-observed the canals, and in twenty of them he found the canals duplicated, the second canal being always 200 to 400 miles distant from its fellow.

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The existence of these canals has been doubted. Mr. Lowell has now devoted years to the subject, has drawn them over and over again, and has photographed them; and accepts the explanation that they are artificial, and that vegetation grows on their banks. Thus is revived the old controversy between Whewell and

1 Mem. Spettr. Ital., xi., p. 28.

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