United States or Philippines ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Night drew on; the sun's disc, enlarged by refraction, was dipping blood-red below the horizon. The distant waves glittered in the west, and sparkled like sheets of liquid silver. Nothing was to be seen in that direction but sky and water, except one sharply-defined object, the hull of the MACQUARIE motionless on her rocky bed.
At any time we might be visited by a comet mightier than either, travelling on an orbit intersecting the sun's surface, followed by flights of meteoric masses enormous in size and many in number, which, falling on the sun's globe with the enormous velocity corresponding to their vast orbital range and their near approach to the sun a velocity of some 360 miles per second would, beyond all doubt, excite his whole frame, and especially his surface regions, to a degree of heat far exceeding what he now emits.
They filled the air with a great clatter of wings, and circled off to various portions of the valley. I heard a great bombardment as they crossed the other lakes, and I knew that someone had taken toll from them. It was a beautiful day, with cloudless sky. The sun's warm summer like rays were in marked contrast to the icy breath of winter, encountered at sunrise. What a grand sunrise it was!
A short process of calculation then gave the exact position of the spot as referred to the sun's centre. From a series of 5,290 observations made in this way, together with a great number of accurate drawings, Carrington derived conclusions of great importance on each of the three points which he had proposed to himself to investigate.
In certain parts of the Caribbean Sea, you can see the sandy bottom with startling distinctness as deep as 145 meters down, and the penetrating power of the sun's rays seems to give out only at a depth of 300 meters. But in this fluid setting traveled by the Nautilus, our electric glow was being generated in the very heart of the waves. It was no longer illuminated water, it was liquid light.
The work of Herschel in this matter has been checked by comparing spectroscopic velocities in the line of sight which, so far as the sun's motion is concerned, would give a maximum rate of approach for stars near Hercules, a maximum rate of recession for stars in the opposite part of the heavens, and no effect for stars half-way between.
The great difficulty was to extricate the coloured image of the gaseous structure, spectroscopically visible at the sun's limb, from the encompassing glare, a very little of which goes a long way in fogging sensitive plates.
I heard two presidents of the English Royal Society, Sir Hans Sloane and Martin Folkes, conversing together in the spiritual world about the existence of seeds and eggs, and about productions from them in the earths. The former ascribed them to nature, and contended that nature was endowed from creation with a power and force to produce such effects by means of the sun's heat.
Heartily thanking our poetical friend for the instructions which he had communicated to us, and charmed out of all sense of fatigue for the moment, we continued our march, till the shelter of a vast wood received us, at once shutting out the glories of the panorama beneath, and screening us from the sun's rays, which had for some time back beat with inconvenient violence upon us from above.
At last the time would come when the planet's path would be reduced to the circular form, its globe touching its sun's all the way round, and then the planet would very quickly be reduced to vapour, and partly burned up, its substance being absorbed by its sun. Nothing of this sort has happened in the case of any so-called new star.
Word Of The Day