The Moon: A Popular TreatiseServiss, Garrett Putman
Science
The Moon: A Popular Treatise
Serviss, Garrett Putman
Moon
“Surely. But Riccioli’s own name is there also. Afterwards I shall show
you his lunar monument, a truly magnificent one. Permit me now to tell
you that Maurolycus is much greater in extent than any of the rings that
we have yet seen. Not by any means so perfect in form as Theophilus, it
covers a vast extent of surface, as much as 150 miles across, with an
amazing mass of broken rings, walls, ramparts, ridges and chasms. Some
of its peaks are 14,000 or 15,000 feet in height. It has a very lofty
central mountain, visible in the photograph, and whose peak comes into
view when the sun is rising long before the surroundings have been
illuminated, so that it resembles a star glowing amid the blackest
night. The neighbor of Maurolycus, Stöfler, is equally extensive and
almost equally wild and magnificent when the sunlight is leaping across
it from pinnacle to pinnacle and ridge to ridge. In this photograph,
however, it is too near the terminator to be well seen. We shall
presently pass to photograph No. 6, where Stöfler appears in full light,
but before doing so let us glance at the northern part of the moon as
here pictured. Close to the terminator, below the grand oval form of the
_Mare Serenitatis_, you will perceive two rings, one above the other.
They seem to be the complement of the other pair, Atlas and Hercules,
which we looked at when the sun had recently risen upon them in another
photograph, and which now appear far off toward the west. You observe
that Atlas and Hercules lie upon an east and west line, and the others
upon a north and south line. The northernmost one is named Aristoteles,
and the other Eudoxus. They are situated near the edge of a plain called
the _Mare Frigoris_, ‘Sea of Cold,’ thus named, I suppose, because it
lies so far north. Aristoteles is about 60 miles in diameter, and its
immense wall is very high and splendidly terraced. Eudoxus, equally
deep, is only 40 miles in diameter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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