Table Of ContentTHE WANDERING ASTRONOMER
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THE
WANDERING
ASTRONOMER
PATRICK MOORE
0
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Boca Raton London New York
CRC Press is an imprint of the
Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Author's Preface
Most books have a set plan. This one has not; it has no plan at all, and
like its two predecessors, Armchair Astronomy and Fireside Astronomy, it is
simply a coUection of totally unconnected essays. Some are more tech
nical than others bur whar I have tried to do is ro presenr material
which you will probably nor flnd in conventionaJ textbooks. Certainly
ir is nor a book to be read straight through in the usual way; but if you
dip inro it at random, I hope you will flnd something thar will appeal ro
you. I have done my best!
Patrick Moore
Selsey, June I 000
Contents
I. The Atmosphere of the Mooo 7
2. The !\1an Who Discovered a Planet 13
3. Moon in Shadcm: 19
4. The Zodiacal intruder 23
5. Fishing Hipparcos Down 27
u/ . The Past and Future Moon 30
7. Visitor to the Ares Vallis 34
8. Harvest Moons, Wolf Moons and Blue Moons 38
9. The Cosmic Zebra 41
HL Flying Saucers in Selsey 47
II. Gene Shoemaker 52
12. The Blackness of Mathilde 59
13. Hitch-Hiker- and Others 62
4. Ice on the Moon) (J
15. Mira Stella 71
16. The Case of the Vanishing Planets 75
17. Poetic Moons 82
1 8. A l jghtning Decision! 84
1< ). The Strange Case of SS Lacertae 87
20. How the Lunar Craters fV'eren I Formed 90
21. The Lonely Brown Dwarf <)7
22. Sister Marie - and Others 100
23. To Catch a Comet 105
24. Curious Callisto 08
25. A Year on Icarus 1 1 1
26. The Lighter Side of Space 115
27. Alshain 122
28. Names in the Sky 127
29. Travel to the Stars? 133
30. Ghost Moons 137
31. Ripples of Creation 152
32. "Des. Res. " on Mars? 155
33. The Edge of the Moon 157
34. The Sad Case of Dr Elliott 163
35. Fast Lane to Pluto 169
36. Life Can Appear- but Will it? 173
37. Thatcher's Comet 175
38. Apocalypse Postponed 179
39. The Star in the East 181
40. It \\ias in the Papers! 185
41. Caribbean Eclipse 197
Glossary 202
Lndex 206
Picture Credits 208
1
The Atmosphere of the Moon
"The Moon is an airless world." You will find this statement in
countless books and, essentially, of course it is true enough.
There is a very simple way to show that the Moon has at best a
very thin atmosphere. \'Vhen a star is occulted, it shines steadily
right up to the moment when it is covered by the advancing
lunar limb; there is no pre-immersion ilickering or fading, as
there is before occultation by Venus (and to a much lesser ex
tent, Mars). But can we be confident that there is no atmosphere
at all?
Originally, it was of course assumed that the Moon must have
an atmosphere dense enough to support life. This was the firm
belief of observers such as Johann Schroter, the first really great
lunar observer, wbo began his work in the late 1770s. William
Herschel, discoverer of Uranus and arguably the most skilled of
alJ observers, beUeved the habitability of the Moon to be "an
absolute certainty'' (for good measure, he also beUeved in a cool,
Sir William Herschel,
discoverer of Uranus.
7
P.\TRJCk MooRF
inhabited Sun), and in 1822 Franz von Paula Gruithuisen
announced that he had identified a true dry with "dark gigantic
ramparts", though, alas, there is nothing in this particular area
other than low, haphazard ridges. This was in 1822; in the fol
lowing decade many Americans were taken in by the celebrated
Lunar Hoax, \vhen the New 'r'ork paper Sun announced that fan
tastic life-forms had been detected there by Sir John Herschel,
who was busily surveying the southern skies from the Cape. (One
earnest group even wrote to inguire whether there were any
immediate plans to convert the Moon-men to Christianity.)
Low-type vegetation was still considered a possibility, even
though a remote one, until less than a century ago, but so far as
I know the last serious astronomer to believe in anything more
advanced was WH. Pickering, who made very notable contribu
tions to lunar and planetary astronomy. Pickering observed an
occultation of Jupiter, in 1892, and recorded a dark band cross
ing the planer's disk, tilted with respect to the usual surface belts.
This he attributed to the absorbing effect of a lunar atmosphere.
He repeated the observation at several later occultations, and
found that the dark band was seen only when Jupiter was cut
the Moon's bright limb. At the dark or night side of the Moon it
was never seen and Pickering concluded that the lunar atmos
phere responsible for it was frozen solid during the Moon's night.
He worked out that the ground density of the lunar atmosphere
was about 1/1800 of the density of our own air at sea level.
But Pickering did not stop there. Between 1919 and 1924 he
carried out a series of lunar observations from the clear skies of
Jamaica, and in particular concentrated on the crater
Eratosthenes, which has high, terraced walls and a central peak.
Pickering claimed that dark patches inside it, which are easy
telescopic objects, moved around during the lunar dav and,
although he was sure that vegetation tracts did exist on the Moon,
he held that the spreading patches were better explained by
swarms of insects. Finally, in 1924, he published a paper in which
he claimed that the parches were probably due to much more
advanced life-forms, which would make them even more curi
cms. "WhiJe this suggestion of a round of lunar life may seem a
8
THE Wo.." DERING AsTRONO~IER
The Great Meteor or 7 October 1862 appears in this old painting. It
was seen across England and apparently was much brighter than the
full moon.
tittle fanciful, and the evidence on which it is founded frail, yet
it is based on the analogy of the migration of the fur
bearing seals of the Pribiloff Islands ... The distance involved
is about rwenry rniies, and is completed in rwelve days. This
involves an average speed of six feet a minute, which, as we
have seen, implies small animals."
Pickering died in 1938, and the idea of lunar creatures died
with him, but the question of a residual lunar atmosphere was
still carefully considered. In 1949 Bernard Lyot and udouin
Dollfus, both great French observers, used the fine 24-inch
refractor at the high-altitude Pic du Midi Observatory, in the
Pyrenees, ro search for lunar twilight effects. They found none
and concluded that any atmosphere must have a density less
than 1/10,000 of ours. Next, V. f'esenkov and Y. N. Lipski, in
what was then the USSR, carried out a search for nvilight effects
9
