Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/314

 traveled completely around the earth. Since the moon has always the same face toward the earth (if one will walk around a table with the eyes always toward the center, this journey will be well illustrated), it will be seen by us in all its phases before it completes a day and night, or, in other words, although the earth turns all sides to the sun in 24 hours, the moon must travel all the way around the earth, which takes almost 30 of our days, before it completes a day and night. This means a continuous stretch of 14¾ times 24 hours of daylight, which is about equal to 29 of our days, of daylight, followed by 14¾ times 24 hours of night, when the sun is below the horizon. It would be a strange experience to travel to this country where the day and night each last half a month.

If a journey to the weird, rough country of the moon were possible, one would experience even greater surprises than the length of the day and the night, for the sky, as seen from this airless sphere, would be strangely different from anything that we are accustomed to. Here the sun hangs like a big gold jewel edged with a tiny fringe of scarlet, the pearly petals of its delicate corona far outstretched against the star-filled sky. The brilliant ball of the earth, which would appear almost 13 times as large in area as the moon, rests immovable and ever present, its great globe turning completely around every 24 hours. Also, as the moon does to us, it would exhibit to an observer on the moon an interesting variety of phases, mammoth crescents, quarters and disks. Such a sky!—a huge white planet, a flower-like sun and multitudes of unwinking stars. And even more, for stretched from horizon to horizon of that black dome, even though the sun shines brightly, is the misty arch of the Milky Way glowing in a glory quite unknown to mortals on earth. All this would happen for the simple reason that the moon has no appreciable amount of atmosphere to diffuse the sun's rays, make the sky seem blue and render the