When out of the brief twilight of intertropical lands, where the sun
drops vertically to the horizon and night rushes on like a wave of
darkness, the Zodiacal Light shoots to the very zenith, its color is
described as a golden tint, entirely different from the silvery sheen
of the Milky Way. If I may venture again to refer to personal
experiences and impressions, I will recall a view of the Zodiacal Light
from the summit of the cone of Mt Etna in the autumn of the year 1896
(more briefly described in _Astronomy with the Naked Eye_). There are
few lofty mountains so favorably placed as Etna for observations of
this kind. It was once resorted to by Prof. George E. Hale, in an
attempt to see the solar corona without an eclipse. Rising directly
from sea-level to an elevation of nearly eleven thousand feet, the
observer on its summit at night finds himself, as it were, lost in the
midst of the sky. But for the black flanks of the great cone on which
he stands he might fancy himself to be in a balloon. On the occasion to
which I refer the world beneath was virtually invisible in the moonless
night. The blaze of the constellations overhead was astonishingly
brilliant, yet amid all their magnificence my attention was immediately
drawn to a great tapering light that sprang from the place on the
horizon where the sun would rise later, and that seemed to be blown out
over the stars like a long, luminous veil. It was the finest view of
the Zodiacal light that I had ever enjoyed—thrilling in its
strangeness—but I was almost disheartened by the indifference of my
guide, to whom it was only a light and nothing more. If he had no
science, he had less poetry—rather a remarkable thing, I thought, for a
child of his clime. The Light appeared to me to be distinctly brighter
than the visible part of the Milky Way which included the brilliant
stretches in Auriga and Perseus, and its color, if one may speak of
color in connection with such an object, seemed richer than that of the
galactic band; but I did not think of it as yellow, although Humboldt
has described it as resembling a golden curtain drawn over the stars,
and Du Chaillu in Equatorial Africa found it of a bright yellow color.
It may vary in color as in conspicuousness. The fascination of that
extraordinary sight has never faded from my memory. I turned to regard
it again and again, although I had never seen the stellar heavens so
brilliant, and it was one of the last things I looked for when the
morning glow began softly to mount in the east, and Sicily and the
Mediterranean slowly emerged from the profound shadow beneath us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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