Crescent moon

“ Of all the heavenly bodies, the sun excepted, the moon is the most impressive and beautiful. As we catch her form, rising as a fair crescent in the western sky after sunset, gradually increasing in size and brilliancy night after night till from her circular disk she throws a full flood of light on our world and then passes through her decreasing phases, we recognise her as "the Governor of the night," or in the words of our own poet, when in her crescent phase, "the Diadem of night." ”

“ No one can fail to notice the beautiful set of phases through which the moon passes every month. A little after the almanac has announced 'new moon,' she begins to appear as a thin crescent low down in the West, and setting shortly after the sun. Night by night we can watch her moving eastward among the stars, and showing more and more of her illuminated surface, until at first quarter half of her disc is bright. ”

“ When the moon is between the earth and the sun she is said to be in conjunction, and is invisible to us for a few nights. This is the phase called new moon. As she emerges from conjunction we see the moon as a delicate crescent in the west just after sunset and she soon sets below the horizon. Half of the moon’s surface is illuminated, but we can see only a slender edge with the horns turned away from the sun. ”

“ This accommodating inner moon, within the brief space of five hours, goes through the phases of a thin crescent, first quarter, and just as it approaches fulness it submits to a total eclipse, followed by a waning quarter, then the reverse crescent of an old moon, and finally it sets where the Sun must soon rise. It is a wonderful heavenly clock, which is never obscured by clouds, and turns its face toward every one alike. ”

“ The earth stays always in the same spot in the sky, just where we see it now as a huge crescent near the sun. As the sun sinks toward the horizon, the earth waxes like the moon seen from the earth, reaching its half-stage at sunset. Then, through the long lunar night it grows, until, at seven of our days after sundown, it becomes full. Then it wanes again, reaching the half at sunrise a week later. If we had landed on the other side of the moon, the earth would have remained invisible. ”

“ The sun, as we all know, appears to cross the sky every day; he gets up in the east and drops down in the west, and the moon does the same, [Pg 4] only the moon is unlike the sun in this, that it changes its shape continually. We see a crescent moon growing every night larger and larger, until it becomes full and fat and round, and then it grows thinner and thinner, until it dies away ”

“ This reflected light must be all round the moon—not at the cusps only of the crescent-moon—and it has occurred to us that it may, most probably does, account for the appearance of what we call "the old moon in the young moon's arms." We know what effect the "earth-shine" has upon the moon at its change, and the brighter ring-shine just outside of it, may very well be caused by the sunlight reflected from the atmosphere far beyond the visible limit of the hemisphere turned to us. ”

“ The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps--does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumour that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning--the smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps.
The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby's limbs--does anybody know where it was hidden so long? Yes, when the mother was a young girl it lay pervading her heart in tender and silent mystery of love--the sweet, soft freshness that has bloomed on baby's limbs. ”

“ You cannot see a faint light in the immediate presence of an overpoweringly brighter light. The part of the moon that the sun illuminates is in the full glare of day, and this is so much more brilliant than the reflected earthlight that that portion of the moon which enjoys only the latter is not visible to us, except for a few days after New Moon, when the amount of light from the crescent is not yet great enough to dazzle our eyes and hide the rest from sight. ”

“ Again, in a solar eclipse, even if there were an atmosphere about the moon not sufficiently dense to form a hazy outline or impair the distinctness of the details of a solar spot, it would still manifest its existence in another way. As the moon advances upon the sun’s disc the latter assumes, of course, a crescent form. Now if air or vapour enveloped the moon, the exceedingly delicate cusps of this crescent would be distorted or turned out of shape. ”

“ The crescent appears a little wider each night, and, as the moon recedes 13° further from the sun each night, she sets correspondingly later, until in her first quarter half of the illuminated hemisphere is turned toward us. ”

“ The Moon shines by reflected light derived from the Sun, and as one half of its surface is always illumined and the other half totally dark, the crescent increases or diminishes when, by the Moon’s change of position, we see more or less of the bright side. Visible at first as a [Pg 261] slender crescent near the setting Sun, the angular distance from the orb and the width of the crescent increase daily, until, at the expiration of seven days, the Moon is distant one quarter of the circumference of the heavens from the Sun. The Moon is then a semi-circle, or in quadrature. ”

“ When the disc of the Moon has advanced so much over that of the Sun as to have reduced the Sun almost to the narrowest possible crescent of light, it is generally noticed that at a certain stage the crescent suddenly breaks up into a succession of spots of light. ”

“ As the crescent grows from day to day, the time of rising becomes later and later until, when the crescent has rounded thru the half Moon and gibbous phases to full Moon, it rises in the east about the time the Sun is setting in the west. As it wanes again, first to the half Moon phase, and then, in the last quarter of the month, to an ever narrower crescent, the time of rising grows ever later until we see it rise for the last time in the month just before sunrise. ”

“ Two or three minutes before totality begins, the solar crescent, reduced to minute proportions, gives comparatively so little light that faint traces of the Sun's atmosphere appear on the western side behind the dark body of the Moon, whose limb then becomes visible outside of the Sun. ”

“ Everybody may be presumed to be acquainted with the spectacle popularly known as “The Old Moon in the New Moon’s Arms” whereby when the Moon is only about two or three days old and exhibits but a narrow crescent of bright light, yet the whole outline of the disc is traceable on the sky. A phenomenon analogous to this may often be seen in the case of Venus when near its inferior conjunction. ”

“ The Full Moon, which we have at present, is a complete round disk, and is always seen directly opposite to the place of the sun, so that she rises when the sun sets. The moon at last quarter is again a half circle, and appears on the meridian in the south at sunrise. The waning moon is like the new moon, crescent-shaped, but the convexity of the bow faces the rising sun, and she is visible only in the morning sky just as dawn begins. ”

“ On account of the vividness of the shadows, moon-mountains are best observed during the first and last quarter of the moon. A good time to begin observing with a glass is when the moon is a narrow crescent in the western sky. ”

“ Each that we lose takes part of us;
A crescent still abides,
Which like the moon, some turbid night,
Is summoned by the tides. ”

“ In ancient Britain the moon occupied a high position in the religion of the Druids, who had superstitious rites at the lunar changes, and who are "always represented as having the crescent in their hands." ”

“ Clouds And Waves Mother, the folk who live up in the clouds call out to me--
"We play from the time we wake till the day ends.
We play with the golden dawn, we play with the silver moon.
I ask, "But, how am I to get up to you?" They answer, "Come to the edge of the earth, lift up your hands to the sky, and you will be taken up into the clouds."
"My mother is waiting for me at home," I say. "How can I leave her and come?"
Then they smile and float away.
But I know a nicer game than that, mother.
I shall be the cloud and you the moon.
I shall cover you with both my hands, and our house-top will be the blue sky. ”

“ During the long forenoon it assumes a crescent which narrows and narrows till at midday the sun is in line with the earth and the latter is invisible, save perhaps by a thin line of light marking its upper or lower edge, accordingly as the sun is apparently above or below it. ”

“ Should the planet happen to be at the height of her splendour when the ceremony is performed, their future life will be a scene of festivity, and all its paths strewed over with rosebuds of delight. But when her tapering horns are turned towards the north, passion becomes frost-bound, and seldom thaws till the genial season again approaches. From the moon they not only draw prognostications of the weather, but according to their creed also discover future events. ”

“ Idles the night wind through the dreaming firs,
That waking murmur low,
As some lost melody returning stirs
The love of long ago;
And through the far, cool distance, zephyr fanned.
The moon is sinking into shadow-land. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dawn, as we have it on earth, can have no counterpart upon the moon. No atmosphere is there to reflect the solar beams while the luminary is yet out of actual sight, and only the glimmer of the zodiacal light heralds the approach of day. From the black horizon the sun suddenly darts his bright untempered beams upon the mountain tops, crowning them with dazzling brilliance while their flanks and valleys are yet in utter darkness. There is no blending of the night into day. ”

“ It is dead, yet the twin luminaries still reign over the street and give it what it has of beauty. In the evening the western vista can blaze with orange and scarlet, and the eastern, having darkened, can shimmer with a mysterious radiance, out of which, incredibly large, rises the globe of the moon. ”

“ Then her “visions of the night” are at times sublimely beautiful. Her star-decked vault of heaven, absolutely free from all mists and fogs and damps, seems so high and vast. The stars glisten and twinkle with wondrous clearness. The flashing meteors fade out but slowly, and the moon is so white and bright that her shadows cast are often as vivid as those of the sun in some other lands. ”

“ Then would come the moonlight to make the world a fairyland of the softest of blue; a mystical land, covered by a velvet sky, studded with sky-diamonds, which seemed very close to the earth, and a moon, like a great ball, stereopticon in its contour and fairly transparent in its soft brilliancy. ”

“ For an hour or two after sunset and before sunrise, we receive rays of reflected and refracted light from the atmosphere above us, which spread a soft, pleasing illumination over the landscape, and render all objects more or less distinctly visible. But if you were on the moon in certain situations, the passage from day to night or from night to-day would be as rapid as the falling or rising of a curtain. Imagine yourself standing on the western wall of Vendelinus or Petavius at the time when this photograph was taken. ”

“ Changing your place to one of the peaks on the dividing wall you would look down into Theophilus on one side and Cyrillus on the other. Then upon lifting your eyes to the black, airless sky you would see the stars sparkling on all hands, and, hanging in the heavens like a portentous, strangely colored moon many times larger than the disk of the sun, would appear the mottled orb of the earth. ”

“ It is the repose of utter silence and quietude, a netherworld only half lighted by the worn-out moon. Yet it has a fearful beauty, found in the magnitude of the space—the grandeur of the huge rocky masses faintly but continuously outlined against the bright sky north of us—the wide realms of gray darkness southward—the marvelous brilliance of the moon—the luminous glory of the overspreading dome, unbroken from horizon to horizon, almost as at sea, and so seeming really a part of the globe and not an external thing. ”

“ In the gloom of the evening, when the sun which bathed the hills in amber light could no longer penetrate the thick curtains of the forest, when the thin song of innumerable mosquitoes thrilled the air and the liquid trilling of frogs arose from every creek and cranny of the swamp, he would leave them and set out for the mission with a sense of exaltation in the work accomplished and horrors overpast. The mere physical relief of emerging into the open air of the thin bush, scattered with slades of waving grasses in which herds of game were grazing, coloured his mood. ”