Pleasures of the telescope: An Illustrated Guide for Amateur Astronomers and a Popular Description of the Chief Wonders of the Heavens for General ReadersServiss, Garrett Putman
Science
Pleasures of the telescope: An Illustrated Guide for Amateur Astronomers and a Popular Description of the Chief Wonders of the Heavens for General Readers
From Cleomenes northward to the pole, or to the northern extremity of
the crescent, if our observations are made during new moon, the ground
appears broken with an immense number of ridges, craters, and mountain
rings, among which we may telescopically wander at will. One of the more
remarkable of these objects, which may be identified with the aid of
Lunar Chart No. 1, is the vast ringed plain near the edge of the disk,
named Gauss. It is more than a hundred and ten miles in diameter. Owing
to its situation, so far down the side of the lunar globe, it is
foreshortened into a long ellipse, although in reality it is nearly a
circle. A chain of mountains runs north and south across the interior
plain. Geminus, Berzelius, and Messala are other rings well worth
looking at. The remarkable pair called Atlas and Hercules demand more
than passing attention. The former is fifty-five and the latter
forty-six miles in diameter. Each sinks 11,000 feet below the summit of
the loftiest peak on its encircling wall. Both are full of interesting
detail sufficient to occupy the careful observer for many nights. The
broad ring bearing the name of Endymion is nearly eighty miles in
diameter, and has one peak 15,000 feet high. The interior plain is flat
and dark. Beyond Endymion on the edge of the disk is part of a gloomy
plain called the _Mare Humboltianum_.
After glancing at the crater-shaped mountains on the western and
southern border of the _Mare Crisium_, Alhazen, Hansen, Condorcet,
Firmicus, etc., we pass southward into the area covered in Lunar Chart
No. 2. The long dark plain south of the _Mare Crisium_ is the _Mare
Fecunditatis_, though why it should have been supposed to be
particularly fecund, or fertile, is by no means clear. On the western
border of this plain, about three hundred miles from the southern end of
the _Mare Crisium_, is the mountain ring, or circumvallation, called
Langrenus, about ninety miles across and in places 10,000 feet high.
There is a fine central mountain with a number of peaks. Nearly a
hundred miles farther south, on the same meridian, lies an equally
extensive mountain ring named Vendelinus. The broken and complicated
appearance of its northern walls will command the observer's attention.
Another similar step southward, and still on the same meridian brings us
to a yet finer mountain ring, slightly larger than the others, and still
more complicated in its walls, peaks, and terraces, and in its
surroundings of craters, gorges, and broken ridges. This is Petavius.
West of Petavius, on the very edge of the disk, is a wonderful
formation, a walled plain named Humboldt, which is looked down upon at
one point near its eastern edge by a peak 16,000 feet in height. About a
hundred and forty miles south of Petavius is the fourth great mountain
ring lying on the same meridian. Its name is Furnerius. Look
particularly at the brilliantly shining crater on the northeast slope of
the outer wall of Furnerius.
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