Press enter after choosing selection

When The Moon Is Full

When The Moon Is Full image
Parent Issue
Day
16
Month
August
Year
1893
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

Did yon ever see a "f uil moon?" aska a writer in tlie St. Louis Republic. I know what your answer will be without waiting for it. It is this: "Yes, once every month since I have been old enough to pay attention to Bvcfa phenomena." Vet I take the position that yon are badly mistaken, and that in all probability yon have never in your life beheld the full face of our "silvery sister worM." By way of solution let us see what it talies to constitute a 'full moon' in the exact sense of the term. A full moon occurs only when vur obsequious attendant is one hundred and eighty degrees of long-itude from the sun, Old Sol and the earth in the ccliptic. But the moon's orbit is inclined to the ecliptic at an angle of five degTees eight minutes forty-seven seconds, and is therefore never on the ecliptic except when at lts "nodes" or urossinga, This being1 the caso, what we cali the circular disk of the moon (full moon) lacks considerable of being1 an exact circle, beingf what astronoiners term "in a state of globosity," and is never a perfect disk except when "a full moon" happens exactly s the time when Luna is crossing the ecli ptic, at which time she must necessarily be centrally eclipted. One of our best present day astronomcrs, in con cluding an article of much merit on the same subject, says: "We therefore conclude that a real full moon, one having1 a perfect circle, has rarely, if ever, been seen." A Corneo SuperatKlon. The pearl hunters of Borneo and adjacent islands have a peculiar superstition. When they open shells in search of pearls, they take every ninth find, whether it be large or small, and put it into a bottle with a dead man"s iinrcr. They are kept and are known as -secd pearls," or pearls," and the nativos of the islands mentioned firmly believe that they have the powers of reproducing1 their kind. For every pearl put into the phial, two grains of rice are thrown in for the pearls to "feed" upon. Some of the white gom hunters of Borneo believe in the suporstition as firmly as the nativos do. It is said that nearly every hut along1 the coast has its "dead iinger" bottle with from nine to ten times that number of "seed pearls," the decaying1 digit and the rice carefully stowed away among them.

Article

Subjects
Old News
Ann Arbor Courier