Astronomy with an Opera-glass: A Popular Introduction to the Study of the Starry Heavens with the Simplest of Optical InstrumentsServiss, Garrett Putman
Science
Astronomy with an Opera-glass: A Popular Introduction to the Study of the Starry Heavens with the Simplest of Optical Instruments
Serviss, Garrett Putman
Astronomy
Newton (12) is the deepest of the great crateriform chasms on the moon.
Some of the peaks on its walls rise twenty-four thousand feet above the
interior gulf. Its shadow, and those of its gigantic neighbors--for the
moon is here crowded with colossal walls, peaks, and craters--may be
seen breaking the line of sunlight below Clavius, in our illustration. I
have just spoken of these great lunar formations as chasms. The word
describes very well the appearance which some of them present when the
line separating day and night on the moon falls across them, but the
reader should not be led by it into an erroneous idea of their real
character. Such formations as Newton, which is one hundred and forty
miles long by seventy broad, may more accurately be described as vast
depressed plains, generally containing peaks and craters, which are
surrounded by a ring of steep mountains, or mountain-walls, that rise by
successive ridges and terraces to a stupendous height.
The double chain of great crater-plains reaching half across the center
of the moon contains some of the grandest of these strange
configurations of conjoined mountain, plain, and crater. The names of
the principal ones can be learned from the map, and the reader will find
it very interesting to watch them coming into sight about first quarter,
and passing out of sight about third quarter. At such times, with a
field-glass, some of them look like enormous round holes in the inner
edge of the illuminated half of the moon. Theophilus (23), Cyrillus
(24), and Catharina (25), are three of the finest walled plains on the
moon--Theophilus, in particular, being a splendid specimen of such
formations. This chain of craters may be seen rapidly coming into
sunlight at the edge of the Sea of Nectar, in our picture of "Sunrise on
the Sea of Serenity," etc. The Altai Mountains (26) are a line of lofty
cliffs, two hundred and eighty miles in length, surmounting a high
table-land.
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