PUBLICATIONS
of the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
THE MOON[1]
By Robert G. Aitken
One Saturday evening, several years ago, I was standing in front of the Lick Observatory with a party of people who had come to look thru the 36-inch telescope. The Sun was just setting behind the hills south of Mt. Tamalpais, and as it disappeared, the slender crescent of the Moon, less than two days past the new, appeared low in the sky south of the sunset point. One of the visitors, after watching it a moment, turned with the question:—"Why is it that the new Moon rises in the west, while the full Moon rises in the east?"
As soon as I recovered, I explained as tactfully as I could that the Moon always rose in the east, but that when it was just past the new Moon stage it rose very near the Sun and after sunrise and therefore could not be seen until the Sun had set, by which time, of course, it was itself approaching the western horizon. But my tact or my explanation, or both, were unequal to the occasion, for when I had finished, the visitor replied with great dignity, "Well! That is the way it may do here, but in Humboldt County the new Moon always rises in the west!"
That any one should be so ignorant concerning the motions of the Moon, is certainly hard to credit; but my visitor differs only in degree from many a famous poet and novelist. I could quote a description of a sunset in a story written by one of the foremost "realist" fiction writers of New England, and published a few years ago in Harper's Monthly Magazine, in which a crescent Moon in the eastern sky adds to the beauty of the scene; or a passage from a novel which was a "best seller" not so very long ago and whose author had a reputation as a scientific man, in which the full Moon rises at midnight. Indeed all kinds of liberties have been taken with the Moon.
Coleridge's lines in The Ancient Mariner,
"The horned Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip."
- ↑ Fourth Adolfo Stahl Lecture.
