Moonbeam

“ This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. ”

“ Sweet-One-Darling put her feet over the side of the boat and tried to trail them in the river, but the moonbeams tickled her so that she could n't stand it very long. And what do you think? When she pulled her feet back into the boat she found them covered with dimples. She did n't know what to make of these phenomena until the Dream-Fairies explained to her that a dimple always remains where a moonbeam tickles a little child. A dimple on the foot is a sure sign that one has been trailing in that beautiful silver river that leads to the Moon. ”

“ The moonbeams played upon the surface of the running water that speeded unceasingly past us towards the sea, like men's lives towards the grave, till it glittered like a wide sheet of silver, that is in the open where the trees threw no shadows. ”

“ The moonbeams trail their shrouds;
Their tattered cerements
Cling to the gauzy clouds,
In ribbons frayed and thin—
And startled by the light
Silence shrinks deeper in
The depths of night.
Useless lie spades and rakes;
Rust's on the garden-tools.
Yet, where the moonlight makes
Nebulous silver pools
A ghostly shape is cast—
Something unseen has stirred.... ”

“ At last he found one that seemed rather substantial and reached right down to a pleasant-looking spot on the earth; and so he swung himself over the edge of the moon, and put both arms tight around the moonbeam and started to slide down. But he found it rather slippery, and in spite of all his efforts to hold on he found himself going faster and faster, so that just before he reached the earth he lost his hold and came tumbling down head over heels and fell plump into a river. ”

“ Why, our moonbeams are lovely little fairies, with wings like dragon-flies, and shiny, silv'ry gowns; and whenever they get tired of flying about they settle down and glow like fireflies. They b'long to the moon lady and are nice fairies. They make sugar stars and moon-ice for us to eat. ”

“ Yet in my dreams I see the moonbeams break and quiver, and hear Cleopatra's murmured words of love mingle with the sound of murmuring waters. Dead are those dear nights, dead is the moon that lit them; the waters which rocked us on their breast are lost in the wide salt sea, and where we kissed and clung there lips unborn shall kiss and cling! ”

“ Ten thousand artemisium mills shot their etheric rays upon the moon, and our unfortunate satellite’s metal ribs were stripped by atomic force. Some of the great white rays that had been one of the telescopic wonders of the lunar landscapes disappeared, and the face of the moon, which had remained unchanged before the eyes of the children of Adam from the beginning of their race, now looked as if the blast of a furnace had swept it. At night, on the moonward side, the earth was studded with brilliant spikes, all pointed at the heart of its child in the sky. ”

“ As she continues her motion around the earth, she draws gradually to the east of the sun's place in the sky. The sunlight then comes somewhat from the side; and so we see a small portion of the right side of the lunar disc illuminated. This is the phase known as the crescent moon.
As she moves on in her orbit more and more of her illuminated surface is brought into view; and so the crescent of light becomes broader and broader, until we get what is called half-moon, or first quarter, when we see exactly one-half of her surface lit up by the sun's rays. ”

“ It was a royal gift the Moon Queen gave. She said that henceforth the beach should be enchanted. The hideous stones the gnomes had thrown should not ruin it after all, but should make it more precious to the world, for they should all turn to shining jewels. She chose to make the white pebbles the loveliest of them all, and so change them that the sea people could never forget her. These stones shone as clear as crystal, and in the pure depths of each one there trembled a moon-ray, a memento of her crystal kingdom. ”

“ The moon slab is of some material that reacts to moonlight. The circles over the top are, without doubt, its operating agency. When the light strikes them they release the mechanism that opens the slab, just as you can open doors with sunlight by an ingenious arrangement of selenium-cells. Apparently it takes the strength of the full moon to do this. We will first try a concentration of the rays of the nearly full moon upon these circles to see whether that will open the rock. ”

“ This was what Orion was talking about the night before, to Lady Moon.” The Princess stopped just long enough to let the Others wonder what it could be.——
“A moonbow,” began the Princess, and the Others said, “Oh-h!”
“A moonbow,” she repeated, “isn’t so gayly colored as a rainbow, but it is shinier, and the most delightful thing you can imagine, to sit on, to see a meteor party. And kind Lady Moon stood with her lantern behind the edge of a cloud, so that the light shouldn’t interfere with the meteors, and held the bow steady, exactly in the best place. ”

“ Moonrise is produced with a sky drop, cut out between the clouds, as in the case of the sunset just described, and a "moon-box." This moon-box is simply a box with a circular hole cut in one side of it. Over this hole is pasted a piece of white muslin, and inside the box is a light. The box is placed behind the muslin sky drop, with the hole against the drop. The light is turned on, and the moon is drawn slowly upward by wires. Of course the illuminated face of the moon shows through the muslin, and disappears when it passes behind the thick canvas clouds. ”

“ But moonlight is, from the very conditions of its production, of such a changeable and fugitive nature, and it affords after all so partial and imperfect an alleviation of night’s darkness, that we are fain to regard the light-giving office of the moon as one of secondary importance. Far more valuable to mankind in general, so estimable as to lead us to place it foremost in our category of lunar offices, is the duty which the moon performs in the character of a sanitary agent. ”

“ The reason is, because of his rayes, which being in the lower vapours, those doe convey an imperfect mixed light upon the waters. Thus the Moone being in the earths shadow, and the Sunne beames which are round about it, not being able to come directly unto her body, yet some second raies there are, which passing through the shadow, make her appeare in that ruddy colour: So that she must appear brightest, when shee is eclipsed, being in her Apoge, or greatest distance from us, because then the cone of the earths shadow is lesse, and the refraction is made through a narrower medium. ”

“ Astronomers on Earth had always been puzzled by the lightness of the Moon. They had speculated on it as being mainly pumice. Lately there had been much speculation and opinion holding forth the theory that the Moon was porous, had these bubbles and air pockets all through it, that the Moon's water and atmosphere had all gone underground to be sealed off in these hollow spaces. ”

“ But the rays which pass back to earth after their impact on the moon's surface are profoundly changed. The spectroscope shows that they lose practically all the slower vibrations we call red and infra-red, while the extremely rapid vibrations we call the violet and ultra-violet are accelerated and altered. Many scientists hold that there is an unknown element in the moon—perhaps that which makes the gigantic luminous trails that radiate in all directions—from the lunar crater Tycho—whose energies are absorbed by and carried on the moon rays. ”

“ A cleft traverses the N. side of the floor of Rhaeticus, and extends across the plain on the E. as far as the N. side of Reaumur.
TRIESNECKER.—Apart from being the centre of one of the most remarkable rill-systems on the moon, this ring-plain, though only about 14 miles in diameter, is an object especially worthy of examination under every phase. At sunrise, and for some time afterwards, owing to the superior altitude of the N.W. section of the wall, a considerable portion of the border on the N. and N.E. is masked by its shadow, which thus appears to destroy its continuity. ”

“ For they shew their effects as well under as above the earth, as well as the earth which worketh in all parts. And plaine it is, that the Moone performeth her operations as wel under the earth, as when we see her visibly aloft: neither is her course any other beneath, than above our horizon. But yet the difference and alteration of the Moone is manifold, and first every seven daies: for whiles she is new, the tides be but small untill the first quarter: for as she groweth bigger, they flow more, but in the full they swell and boile most of all. ”

“ On the picture of the moon the same white which has been used for depicting the Bedouins' garments must be used for representing the moon’s disk, and its reflection in the water; although the real moon has only one-fifth of this brightness, and its reflection in water still less. Hence white garments in moonlight, or marble surfaces, even when the artist gives them a grey shade, will always be ten to twenty times as bright in his picture as they are in reality. ”

“ Most observers will agree with Schmidt, that observations and drawings of objects on the sombre depressed plains of the moon are easier and pleasanter to make than on the dazzling highlands, and that the lunar "sea" is to the working selenographer like an oasis in the desert to the traveller—a relief in this case, however, not to an exhausted body, but to a weary eye. ”

“ Suddenly, like an automatic switch being thrown on an electronic relay, a memory shot into his thoughts. He was well-read in astronomy, particularly on the subject of the Moon, and the thought that struck him was this: Astronomers did not see meteors crash into the Moon! They just didn't! And Moon observation under powerful telescopes was most exact; if even fair-sized meteors hit the Moon with the same explosive impact that they hit Earth, they would be seen beyond question. ”

“ The early Babylonians imagined that the moon had a bright and a dark side, and that her phases were caused by the bright side coming more and more into view during her movement around the sky. The Greeks, notably Aristotle, set to work to examine the question from a mathematical standpoint, and came to the conclusion that the crescent and other appearances were such as would necessarily result if the moon were a dark body of spherical shape illumined merely by the light of the sun. ”

“ Moonflower felt herself carried away by the water; her cries and struggles were of no avail, and, catching and clinging to every object she passed, she was whirled away and very soon lost consciousness. In this condition she floated along the river for leagues and leagues, with her long hair spread out like a fan behind her, to where it flowed at the foot of the Crystal Mountains. ”

“ This regolith may vary its thickness between 2 to 20 meters, so every time a mission land on the Moon, it leaves a record of that event. Even though the Moon is covered in this dust, most of its surface (under this layer) has basalt, a volcanic rock, or, in this case, from a lunar core rock that resurfaced after meteors impacts.
The Moon, unlike stars like the Sun, but like the planets, doesn’t emit light itself but reflects the light that comes from the Sun, which happens due to the lack of mass to produce energy in its core. ”

“ If the Moone had any light of her owne, then would she not lose it in the earths shadow, but rather shine more clearely, since every light appeares greater in the darke, when it is not hindered by a more perspicuous brightnesse. ”

“ The evidence that the slab had opened was unmistakable, but might not Thora simply have found it open through some mechanism, still working after ages, and dependent for its action upon laws of physics unknown to us upon the full light of the moon? The assertion of the natives that the ani had greatest power at this time might be a far-flung reflection of knowledge which had found ways to use forces contained in moonlight, as we have found ways to utilize the forces in the sun's rays. ”

“ When next we saw mooncalves they were some little distance away from us in a place of tumbled rocks. The less vertical surfaces of the rocks were thick with a speckled green plant growing in dense mossy clumps, upon which these creatures were browsing. We stopped at the edge of the reeds amidst which we were crawling at the sight of them, peering out at them and looking round for a second glimpse of a Selenite. They lay against their food like stupendous slugs, huge, greasy hulls, eating greedily and noisily, with a sort of sobbing avidity. ”

“ Of course, the meteors that hit Earth were almost entirely burned up by atmospheric friction long before reaching the surface.
But the Moon apparently had no atmosphere ... there should have been nothing to prevent them from constantly battering the face of the Moon in a continuous, heavy rain of iron and rock. Lunar meteors should be visible all the time. But they were not!
So ... what would really happen when his rocket hit the Moon?
Robin was tingling with strange excitement. ”