Project Gutenberg #25267
Astronomy for Amateurs
Camille Flammarion
1904Flammarion's popular introduction to observing and understanding the night sky, prepared from Project Gutenberg HTML.
Project Gutenberg #25267 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for MojiMori from public-domain source metadata
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words at B2 or above
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at or above your level
determine anything in regard to lunar life.
Any one who likes to be impressed by grand and magnificent sights may turn even a modest field-glass upon our luminous satellite, at about first quarter, when the relief of its surface, illuminated obliquely by the Sun, is at its greatest value. If you examine our neighbor world at this period, for choice at the hour of sunset, you will be astonished at its brilliancy and beauty. Its outlines, its laces, and embroideries, give the image of a jewel of shining silver, translucent, fluid, palpitating in the ether. Nothing could be more beautiful, nothing purer, and more celestial, than this lunar globe floating in the silence of space, and sending back to us as in some fairy dream the solar illumination that floods it. But yesterday I received the same impression, watching a great ring half standing out, and following the progress of the Sun as it mounted the lunar horizon to touch these[Pg 258] silvered peaks. And I reflected that it is indeed inconceivable that 999,999⁄1,000,000 of the inhabitants of our planet should pass their lives without ever having attended to this pageant, nor to any of those others which the divine Urania scatters so profusely beneath the wondering gaze of the observers of the Heavens.
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