From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne [beach books .TXT] 📗

the moon without intermission, leaving not a point of her surface unexplored, and yet her diameter measures 2,150 miles; her surface is one-thirteenth of the surface of the globe, and her volume one-forty-ninth of the volume of the terrestrial spheroid; but none of her secrets could escape the astronomers’ eyes, and these clever savants carried their wonderful observations still further.

Thus they remarked that when the moon was at her full the disc appeared in certain places striped with white lines, and during her phases striped with black lines. By prosecuting the study of these with greater precision they succeeded in making out the exact nature of these lines. They are long and narrow furrows sunk between parallel ridges, bordering generally upon the edges of the craters; their length varied from ten to one hundred miles, and their width was about 1,600 yards. Astronomers called them furrows, and that was all they could do; they could not ascertain whether they were the dried-up beds of ancient rivers or not. The Americans hope, some day or other, to determine this geological question. They also undertake to reconnoitre the series of parallel ramparts discovered on the surface of the moon by Gruithuysen, a learned professor of Munich, who considered them to be a system of elevated fortifications raised by Selenite engineers. These two still obscure points, and doubtless many others, can only be definitely settled by direct communication with the moon.

As to the intensity of her light there is nothing more to be learnt; it is 300,000 times weaker than that of the sun, and its heat has no appreciable action upon thermometers; as to the phenomenon known as the “ashy light,” it is naturally explained by the effect of the sun’s rays transmitted from the earth to the moon, and which seem to complete the lunar disc when it presents a crescent form during its first and last phases.

Such was the state of knowledge acquired respecting the earth’s satellite which the Gun Club undertook to perfect under all its aspects, cosmographical, geographical, geological, political, and moral.

What It Is Impossible to Ignore and What Is No Longer Allowed to Be Believed in the United States

The immediate effect of Barbicane’s proposition was that of bringing out all astronomical facts relative to the Queen of Night. Everybody began to study her assiduously. It seemed as if the moon had appeared on the horizon for the first time, and that no one had ever seen her in the sky before. She became the fashion; she was the lion of the day, without appearing less modest on that account, and took her place amongst the “stars” without being any the prouder. The newspapers revived old anecdotes in which this “Sun of the wolves” played a part; they recalled the influence which the ignorance of past ages had ascribed to her; they sang about her in every tone; a little more and they would have quoted her witty sayings; the whole of America was filled with selenomania.

The scientific journals treated the question which touched upon the enterprise of the Gun Club more specially; they published the letter from the Observatory of Cambridge, they commented upon it and approved of it without reserve.

In short, even the most ignorant Yankee was no longer allowed to be ignorant of a single fact relative to his satellite, nor, to the oldest women amongst them, to have any superstitions about her left. Science flooded them; it penetrated into their eyes and ears; it was impossible to be an ass⁠—in astronomy.

Until then many people did not know how the distance between the earth and the moon had been calculated. This fact was taken advantage of to explain to them that it was done by measuring the parallax of the moon. If the word “parallax” seemed new to them, they were told it was the angle formed by two straight lines drawn from either extremity of the earth’s radius to the moon. If they were in doubt about the perfection of this method, it was immediately proved to them that not only was the mean distance 234,347 miles, but that astronomers were right to within seventy miles.

To those who were not familiar with the movements of the moon, the newspapers demonstrated daily that she possesses two distinct movements, the first being that of rotation upon her axis, the second that of revolution round the earth, accomplishing both in the same time⁠—that is to say, in 27⅓ days.

The movement of rotation is the one that causes night and day on the surface of the moon, only there is but one day and one night in a lunar month, and they each last 354⅓ hours. But, happily, the face, turned towards the terrestrial globe, is lighted by it with an intensity equal to the light of fourteen moons. As to the other face, the one always invisible, it has naturally 354 hours of absolute night, tempered only by “the pale light that falls from the stars.” This phenomenon is due solely to the peculiarity that the movements of rotation and revolution are accomplished in rigorously equal periods, a phenomenon which, according to Cassini and Herschel, is common to the satellites of Jupiter, and, very probably to the other satellites.

Some well-disposed but rather unyielding minds did not quite understand at first how, if the moon invariably shows the same face to the earth during her revolution, she describes one turn round herself in the same period of time. To such it was answered⁠—“Go into your dining-room, and turn round the table so as always to keep your face towards the centre; when your circular walk is ended you will have described one circle round yourselves, since your eye will have successively traversed every point of the room. Well, then, the room is the heavens, the table is the earth, and you are the moon!”

And they go away delighted with the comparison.

Thus, then, the moon always presents the same face to the earth; still,