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Updated: June 8, 2025
It was to be fired off on the night of December 1st, at thirteen minutes and twenty seconds before eleven o'clock, precisely. Four days afterwards it was to hit the Moon, at the very moment that she reached her perigee, that is to say, her nearest point to the Earth, about 228,000 miles distant.
In his planetary theory he found that the places given by his adopted excentric did not fit, being one way at apogee and the other at perigee; so that the centre of distance must be nearer the earth.
His business was to collect rents, of course; but what he did with them, no one was bold enough to surmise. The estate was in Chancery, it was said, and the definition conveyed about as much to the mind of the average inhabitant of Billingsfield, as if he had been informed that the moon was in perigee or the sun in Scorpio. The practical result of its being in Chancery was that no one lived there.
"Well," said Roger, laughing, "yes, I suppose I do mean perigees, and that kind of thing. They are not in your line, Miranda, I know." "Oh, but I respect them!" said Mrs. Merryweather. "There is nothing I respect more highly than a perigee, unless it be an apogee, which always sounds like the beginning of an incantation. So Hilda likes them, does she?"
The Earth when nearest to the Sun, is in her perihelion; when most distant, in her aphelion. The Moon, with regard to the Earth, is similarly in her perigee, and her apogee. Analogous expressions denoting the relations of the Projectile towards the Moon, would be periselene and aposelene. At its aposelene the Projectile's velocity would have reached its minimum; at the periselene, its maximum.
To-day I became strongly impressed with the idea, that the balloon was now actually running up the line of apsides to the point of perigee in other words, holding the direct course which would bring it immediately to the moon in that part of its orbit the nearest to the earth. The moon itself was directly overhead, and consequently hidden from my view.
At its apogee the moon is at 247,552 miles from the earth, and at its perigee at 218,657 miles only, which makes a difference of 28,895, or more than a ninth of the distance. The perigee distance is, therefore, the one that should give us the basis of all calculations.
Clairaut shall remove the perplexity occasioned by the seeming discrepancy between the observed and computed motions of the moon's perigee.
Well, then, every time that the moon is in favourable conditions of zenith, if not of perigee that is to say, about once a year could they not send us a projectile loaded with provisions which we should expect by a fixed date?" "Hurrah!" cried J.T. Maston. "That is not at all a bad idea. Certainly we will not forget you." "I depend upon you.
By that means we shall be sure not to be stopped on the road." The 1st of December came, the fatal day, for if the projectile did not start that very evening at 10h. 46m. and 40s. p.m., more than eighteen years would elapse before the moon would present the same simultaneous conditions of zenith and perigee.
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