Garrett Putman Serviss

“ There is probably no single telescopic view that can compare in the power to excite wonder with that of Saturn when the ring system is not so widely opened but that both poles of the planet project beyond it. One returns to it again and again with unflagging interest, and the beauty of the spectacle quite matches its singularity. When Saturn is in view the owner of a telescope may become a recruiting officer for astronomy by simply inviting his friends to gaze at the wonderful planet. ”

“ There is something almost startling in their appearance of companionship with the huge planet—this sudden verification to your eyes of the laws of gravitation and of central forces. It is easy, while looking at Jupiter amid his family, to understand the consternation of the churchmen when Galileo's telescope revealed that miniature of the solar system, and it is gratifying to gaze upon one of the first battle grounds whereon science gained a decisive victory for truth. ”

“ In the soft air of a summer night, when fireflies are flashing their lanterns over the fields, the stars do not sparkle and blaze like those that pierce the frosty skies of winter. The light of Sirius, Aldebaran, Rigel, and other midwinter brilliants possesses a certain gemlike hardness and cutting quality, but Antares and Vega, the great summer stars, and Arcturus, when he hangs westering in a July night, exhibit a milder radiance, harmonizing with the character of the season. ”

“ In other words, Venus, if Schiaparelli and Lowell are right, always presents the same side to the sun, possessing, in consequence, a day hemisphere and a night hemisphere which never interchange places. This condition is so antagonistic to all our ideas of what constitutes habitability for a planet that one hesitates to accept it as proved, and almost hopes that it may turn out to have no real existence. Venus, as the twin of the earth in size, is a planet which the imagination, warmed by its sunny aspect, would fain people with intelligent beings a little fairer than ourselves ”

“ The contrasting colors of various parts of the disk are also easily studied with a glass of four or five inches' aperture.
There is a charm about the great planet when he rides high in a clear evening sky, lording it over the fixed stars with his serene, unflickering luminousness, which no possessor of a telescope can resist. You turn the glass upon him and he floats into the field of view, with his cortége of [Pg 142] satellites, like a yellow-and-red moon, attended by four miniatures of itself. You instantly comprehend Jupiter's mastery over his satellites—their allegiance is evident. ”

“ If we grant that the solar system is the only one in which small planets exist revolving around their sun in nearly circular orbits, then indeed we seem to have closed all the outer universe against such beings as the inhabitants of the earth. Beyond the sun's domain only whirling stars, coupled in eccentric orbits, dark stars, some of them, but no planets—in short a wilderness, full of all energies except those of sentient life! ”

“ Unfortunate star, doomed to carry its parasitical burden of hydrogen and helium, like Sindbad in the clasp of the Old Man of the Sea! Surely, the human imagination is never so wonderful as when it bears an astronomer on its wings. ”

“ On the southeast Theophilus is connected by extensions of its walls with a shattered ring of vast extent called Cyrillus; and south from Cyrillus, and connected with the same system of broken walls, lies the still larger ring named Catharina, whose half-ruined walls and numerous crater pits present a fascinating spectacle as the shadows retreat before the sunrise advancing across them. These three—Theophilus, Cyrillus, and Catharina—constitute a scene of surpassing magnificence, a glimpse of wonders in another world sufficient to satisfy the most riotous imagination. ”

“ Well, where nobody positively knows, everybody has free choice. In the meantime, look at the spot in the sky where that little star made its appearance and underwent its marvelous transformation, for, even if you can see no remains of it there, you will feel your interest in the problem it has presented, and in the whole subject of astronomy, greatly heightened and vivified, as the visitor to the field of Waterloo becomes a lover of history on the spot. ”

“ There is a great charm in watching this pair of stars even with a three-inch telescope—not so much on account of what is seen, although they are very beautiful, as on account of what we know they are doing. It is no slight thing to behold two distant stars obeying the law that makes a stone fall to the ground and compels the earth to swing round the sun. ”

“ The constellation Scorpio is nearly as striking in outline as Orion, and its brightest star, the red Antares (α in map No. 12) , carries concealed in its rays a green jewel which, to the eye of the enthusiast in telescopic recreation, appears more beautiful and inviting each time that he penetrates to its hiding place. ”

“ Occasionally a rare combination of perfect homogeneity in the material, complete harmony between the two kinds of glass of which the objective is composed, and lens surfaces whose curves are absolutely right, produces a telescope whose owner would part with his last dollar sooner than with it. Such treasures of the lens-maker's art can not, perhaps, be commanded at will, yet, they are turned out with increasing frequency, and the best artists are generally able, at all times, to approximate so closely to perfection that any shortcoming may be disregarded. ”

“ But smaller instruments reveal only the in-running star streams and the sprinkling of stellar points over the main aggregation, which cause it to sparkle like a cloud of diamond dust transfused with sunbeams. The appearance of flocking together that those uncountable thousands of stars present calls up at once a picture of our lone sun separated from its nearest stellar neighbor by a distance probably a hundred times as great as the entire diameter of the spherical space within which that multitude is congregated. ”

“ Although amateurs have played a conspicuous part in telescopic discovery among the heavenly bodies, yet every owner of a small telescope should not expect to attach his name to a star. But he certainly can do something perhaps more useful to himself and his friends; he can follow the discoveries that others, with better appliances and opportunities, have made, and can thus impart to those discoveries that sense of reality which only comes from seeing things with one's own eyes. ”

“ A telescope magnifying 1,000 diameters brings the moon within an apparent distance of less than 240 miles. If telescopes are ever made with a magnifying power of 10,000 diameters, then, provided that atmospheric difficulties can be overcome, we shall see the moon as if it were only about twenty miles off, and a sensitive astronomer might be imagined to feel a little hesitation about gazing so closely at the moon—as if he were peering into a neighbor world's window. ”

“ Systems far vaster than ours are now in the bud, and long before they have bloomed, ambitious man, who once dreamed that all these things were created to serve him, will probably have vanished with the extinguishment of the little star whose radiant energy made his life and his achievements briefly possible. ”

“ Judged by our terrestrial experience, which is all we have to go by, the magnitude of a planet, if it is to bear life resembling that of the earth, is limited by other considerations. Even Jupiter, which, as far as our knowledge extends, represents the extreme limit of great planetary size, may be too large ever to become the abode of living beings of a high organization. ”

“ The most realistic drawings and the sharpest photographs in astronomy are those of the moon, yet I think nobody would maintain that any picture in existence is capable of imparting a really satisfactory visual impression of the appearance of the lunar globe. Nobody who has not seen the moon with a telescope—it need not be a large one—can form a correct and definite idea of what the moon is like. ”

“ Aldebaran is further interesting as being a standard first-magnitude star. With the four-inch glass we see without difficulty the tenth-magnitude companion following Aldebaran at a distance of 114", p. 35°. There is an almost inexplicable charm about these faint attendants of bright stars, which is quite different from the interest attaching to a close and nearly equal pair. The impression of physical relationship is never lacking though it may be deceptive, and this awakens a lively appreciation of the vast differences of magnitude that exist among the different suns of space. ”

“ As the line of sunrise runs directly across their highest peaks, the effect is startling. The greatest elevations are about 12,000 feet. The observer's eye is instantly caught by a great valley, running like a furrow through the center of the mountain mass, and about eighty or ninety miles in length. The sealike expanse south and southeast of the Alps is the Mare Imbrium, and it is along the coast of this so-called sea that the Alps attain their greatest height. ”

“ The conclusion, then, seems to be that we are not justified in assuming that the solar system is unique simply because it differs widely from the double and multiple star systems; and that we should rather regard it as probable that the vast multitude of stars which do not appear, when viewed with the telescope, or studied by spectroscopic methods, to have any attendants comparable with themselves in magnitude, have originated in a manner resembling that of the sun's origin, and may be the centers of true planetary systems like ours. ”

“ There are hundreds of things continually referred to in books and writings on astronomy which have but a misty and uncertain significance for the mere reader, but which he can easily verify for himself with the aid of a telescope of four or five inches aperture, and which, when actually confronted by the senses, assume a meaning, a beauty, and an importance that would otherwise entirely have escaped him. ”

“ But Jupiter, if it is ever to become a solid, rocky globe like ours, must shrink enormously in volume, since its density is only 0.24 as compared with the earth. Now, the surface gravity of a planet depends on its mass and its radius, being directly as the former and inversely as the square of the latter. But in shrinking Jupiter will lose none of its mass, although its radius will become much smaller. The force of gravity will consequently increase on its surface as the planet gets smaller and more dense. ”

“ But the five-inch goes a step farther and enables us, with steady gazing to see even a sixth star, of only the twelfth magnitude, just outside the Trapezium, near the brightest member of the quartet. The Lick telescope has disclosed one or two other minute points of light associated with the Trapezium. But more interesting than the Trapezium is the vast cloud, full of strange shapes, surrounding it. Nowhere else in the heavens is the architecture of a nebula so clearly displayed. ”

“ A planet, in the sense which we attach to the word, can not be comparable in mass and size with the sun around which it revolves. The sun is a thousand times larger than the greatest of its attendant planets, Jupiter, and more than a million times larger than the earth. It is extremely doubtful whether the relation of sun and planet could exist between two bodies of anything like equal size, or even if one exceeded the other many times in magnitude. ”

“ Did an extinguished sun, flying blindly through space, plunge into a vast cloud of meteoric particles, and, under the lashing impact of so many myriads of missiles, break into superficial incandescence, while the cosmical wrack through which it had driven remained glowing with nebulous luminosity? ”

“ It is Spica, the great gem of Virgo, and, yielding to its attraction, we now enter the richer constellation over which it presides (map No. 9) . Except for its beauty, which every one must admire, Spica, or α Virginis, has no special claim upon our attention. Some evidence has been obtained that, like β Aurigæ and Capella, it revolves with an invisible companion of great mass in an orbit only six million miles in diameter. Spica's spectrum resembles that of Sirius. The faint star which our larger apertures show about 6' northeast of Spica is of the tenth magnitude. ”

“ If the air is not reasonably steady we had better postpone our experiment to another night, because we shall find that the star as seen in the telescope flickers and "boils," and behaves in so extraordinary a fashion that there is no more definition in the image than there is steadiness in a bluebottle buzzing on a window pane. ”

“ But the double and multiple stars, numerous though they be, are outnumbered a hundred to one by the single stars which shine alone as our sun does. What reason can we have, then, for excluding these single stars, constituting as they do the vast majority of the celestial host, from a similarity to the sun in respect to the manner of their evolution from the original nebulous condition? These stars exhibit no companions, such planetary attendants as they may have lying, on account of their minuteness, far beyond the reach of our most powerful instruments. ”

“ Lord Rosse's telescope has revealed in it a complicated spiral structure, recalling the photographs of the Andromeda nebula, and indicating that stupendous changes must be in process within it, although our records of observation are necessarily too brief to bring out any perceptible alteration of figure. It would seem that the astronomer has, of all men, the best reasons for complaining of the brevity of human life. ”

“ Jupiter is perhaps the easiest of all the planets for the amateur observer. A three-inch telescope gives beautiful views of the great planet, although a four-inch or a five-inch is of course better. But there is no necessity for going beyond six inches' aperture in any case. For myself, I should care for nothing better than my Byrne five-inch of fifty-two inches' focal distance. ”

“ By studying the appearance of the star disk when in focus and of the rings when out of focus on either side, an experienced eye can readily detect any fault that a telescope may have. The amateur, of course, can only learn to do this by considerable practice. Any glaring and serious fault, however, will easily make itself manifest. Suppose, for example, we observe that the image of a star instead of being perfectly round is oblong, and that a similar defect appears in the form of the rings when the eyepiece is put out of focus. We know at once that something is wrong ”

“ It is not possible to suppose that Mira can be the center of a system of habitable planets, no matter what we may think of the more constant stars in that regard, because its radiation manifestly increases more than six hundred fold, and then falls off again to an equal extent once in every ten or eleven months. I have met people who can not believe that the Almighty would make a sun and then allow its energies "to go to waste," by not supplying it with a family of worlds. ”

“ Our star map No. 1 will serve as a guide to the objects which we are about to inspect. Let us begin operations with our smallest telescope, the three-inch. I may remark here that, just as the lowest magnifying power that will clearly reveal the object looked for gives ordinarily better results than a higher power, so the smallest telescope that is competent to show what one wishes to see is likely to yield more satisfaction, as far as that particular object is concerned, than a larger glass. The larger the object glass and the higher the power, the greater are the atmospheric difficulties. ”

“ But a great telescope and a high magnifying power are not required to interest the amateur astronomer in the study of the moon. Our three-inch telescope is amply sufficient to furnish us with entertainment for many an evening while the moon is running through its phases, and we shall find delight in frequently changing the magnifying power as we watch the lunar landscapes, because every change will present them in a different aspect. ”

“ A small telescope will perform very well on a night when a large one is helpless.
Turn the glass upon β (Rigel) , the white first-magnitude star in Orion's left foot. Observe whether the image with a high power is clear, sharp, and free from irregular wisps of stray light. Look at the rings in and out of focus, and if you are satisfied with the performance, try for the companion. A good three-inch is certain to show it, except in a bad state of the atmosphere, and even then an expert can see it, at least by glimpses. ”

“ With such a glass more details are visible in the dark belts and along the bright equatorial girdle than can be correctly represented in a sketch before the rotation of the planet has altered their aspect, while the shadows of the satellites thrown upon the broad disk, and the satellites themselves when in transit, can be seen sometimes with exquisite clearness. ”

“ If, then, that process has prevailed in the stellar universe to the practical exclusion of the other, there should be very few single stars; whereas, as a matter of fact, the immense majority of the stars are single. And, remembering that the sun viewed from stellar distances would appear unattended by subsidiary bodies, are we not justified in concluding that its origin is a type of the origin of the other single stars? ”