“I’m sure it would prove useful on the earth,” the astronomer remarked. He looked through the
STRANDED IN SPACE 75
telescope for a moment, then turned to Tom. “You know,” Dr. Stevens went on, “the moon has always held great fascination for me. He smiled. “For me and many other astronomers down through the ages.”
He and Tom began to discuss the early astronomers. First, how five thousand years ago the Chinese had developed a perfect system for predicting the occurrence of eclipses. And how, in the third century b.c., Aristarchus had measured the distance from the earth to the moon with an amazing degree of accuracy. Then had come George Darwin, son of the great biologist and history’s greatest expert on tides, who had formed one of the basic hypotheses on the origin of the moon.
Other astronomers had mapped the fifty-nine per cent of the moon’s surface which is visible from the earth. They had measured and named over thirty thousand craters, and had found that some are less than one mile across, and others over one hundred and fifty miles in diameter, and their depths range from very shallow to one like Newton’s Crater, which is over 23,800 feet deep. These students of the moon had also measured the heights of its mountains and named them-some peaks being as high as Everest. They had plotted all of the rays and rills as well as the fourteen “peas.”
“We hope to see these things in person,” Tom observed as he left the astronomer.
76 THE RACE TO THE MOON
After Tom and Bud had had a brief nap and breakfast, they were ready to take off on the return trip to earth.