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'There are several degrees of brightness, he says, 'observable in the different objects which shine out by the earth-light. This fact probably explains the greater part of the perplexing statements concerning the illumination of certain craters. It certainly accounts for the volcanic activity which has so often been supposed to be manifested by Aristarchus.
It was the earth-lit portion of the long familiar and yet mysterious orb which was to be their resting place for the next few hours. "The sun hasn't risen over there yet," said Redgrave, as she was peering down into the void. "It's earth-light still. Now look at the other side." She crossed the deck, and saw the strangest scene she had yet beheld.
Yet, spite of my crying, she stayed out there upon the sea, and only shook her head, sorrowfully; but, in her eyes was the old earth-light of tenderness, that I had come to know, before all things, ere we were parted. "At her perverseness, I grew desperate, and essayed to wade out to her; yet, though I would, I could not.
It was evidently what gave the name to the creek, and I have since noticed the same name elsewhere in the Western country, and I suppose the phenomenon is not uncommon. For an hour or more it remained; we never seemed to get nearer to it; it was an eerie thing the earth-light of the moon on that side, I saw it all the time.
"Yes, startling is the word for it," observed Barbican, replying to a remark of Ardan's; "and still more so when we reflect that not only are both lunar hemispheres deprived, by turns, of sun light for nearly 15 days, but that also the particular hemisphere over which we are at this moment floating is all that long night completely deprived of earth-light.
When we remember, however, that "full earth-light" on Venus, at its nearest, has little more than 1/12000 its intensity on the moon, we see at once that the explanation is inadequate. Nor can Professor Safarik's, by phosphorescence of the warm and teeming oceans with which Zöllner regarded the globe of Venus as mainly covered, be seriously entertained. Vogel's suggestion is more plausible.
Local peculiarities of surface, besides, are liable to produce perplexing effects. The reflection of earth-light at a particular angle from certain bright summits completely, though temporarily, deceived Herschel into the belief that he had witnessed, in 1783 and 1787, volcanic outbursts on the dark side of the moon.
If it were always bright we should conclude at once that the earth-light shining upon it rendered it visible. Thus when the moon is nearly new our earth is shining in the lunar skies as a nearly full moon thirteen times as large as ours.
But the secondary light of Venus admits of no such explanation, since earth-light on her surface, diminished by 1/12000th part compared to what it is on that of the moon, would be quite insufficient to render her visible to our eyes.
It is precisely similar to that of the "old moon in the new moon's arms"; and Zenger, who witnessed it with unusual distinctness, January 8, 1883, supposes it due to the same cause namely, to the faint gleam of reflected earth-light from the night-side of the planet.
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