Rough Ways Made Smooth: A series of familiar essays on scientific subjectsProctor, Richard A. (Richard Anthony)
Science
Rough Ways Made Smooth: A series of familiar essays on scientific subjects
Proctor, Richard A. (Richard Anthony)
Science
But there remains to be mentioned a form of evidence respecting
lunar features which could not be effectively applied to the case
of the crater Linné, because the moon had only been subject to the
necessary method of examination during a few years before that crater
was missed. I refer to lunar photography. Many objects less than two
miles in diameter are shown in the best photographs of our satellite
by Rutherfurd, De la Rue, Ellery, and Draper; and as the moon has been
photographed in every phase, some among the views might fairly be
expected to show Klein's crater if it really existed before 1877. I do
not find that in any lunar photographs the crater is shown as a black
or dark gray spot. But in Rutherfurd's splendid photograph of the moon
on March 6, 1865 (when the moon was about nine days five hours old),
the place of Klein's crater is occupied by a small spot lighter than
the surrounding 'sea.' This is the usual appearance of a small crater
under a high sun; and though it may indicate only the existence of a
flat crater floor in 1865 where now a great conical hole exists, it
throws some degree of doubt on the occurrence of any change at all
there. The case strongly suggests the necessity for continuing the
work of lunar photography, which seems of late years to have flagged.
Photographs of the moon should be taken in every aspect and in every
stage of her librational swayings. Possessing such a series, we should
be able to decide at once whether any newly-recognised crater was in
reality a new formation or not.
_THE NOVEMBER METEORS._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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