Dreams of an astronomer

by Camille Flammarion

IV. VENUS THE BEAUTIFUL

CHAPTER IV
VENUS THE BEAUTIFUL

Eσπερος ος кἀλλιστος έν ούρανω ιρταται ἁστηρ.

(Hesperus, most beautiful of stars in the sky.)

HOMER, Iliad.

IT was Homer who, 3,000 years ago, saluted Venus as the most beautiful of stars. Who has not been struck with her wonderful brilliance? Who can refrain, when she shines so marvellously in the heavens, from greeting her as the brightest of the stars and asking what mysteries are hidden in that light?

This radiant star of eve has been the first to be noticed since the earliest ages; it is the only planet mentioned by Homer; Isaiah celebrated her splendour under the name of Lucifer; at the time of the pyramids the Egyptians called her “the celestial bird of morn and eventide;” thirty-five centuries ago the Babylonians observed one of its transits across the sun; the Indians called her “the brilliant,” and the Arabs “Zorah, the splendour of the sky.” From the earliest days of the world she was the goddess of beauty and love. Let us raise our eyes to the heavens to-night: there is the star chanted by Homer and Virgil.

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How many events have happened since those far-off days! Nations, languages, religions, all have changed. Where are the eyes which looked upon Venus 3,000 years ago? Where are the hearts which confided to her their vows of love for all eternity? And who will be our successors when, 3,000 years hence, the Parisians of the fiftieth century admire, as we do now, the star of the Iliad twinkling in their sky? The history of man passes quickly, the waves succeed each other and disappear in the ocean of the ages; the heavens remain, and the astronomer smiles at great ambition and puny achievements.

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Venus passes every eighth year through the period of greatest brilliance (1889-1897-1905-1913-1921-1929). She is then so bright that she casts a shadow like a small moon. This is easily seen either in a dark room or when walking past a wall in the country. She can be seen in daylight with the naked eye, not only before sunset, but at midday if one knows where she is. No star or planet attains anything comparable to such brightness.

This visibility of Venus in daylight has been noticed for a long time; sometimes it becomes a public event, as in the spring of 1905. That year among others our beautiful neighbour was under exceptionally favourable conditions of observation. Everyone could see the radiant planet flaming in the west in the spring; in February, March, and April, the proximity of Jupiter, and sometimes of the Moon showed to all eyes a most charming spectacle. The astronomical ignorance of the inhabitants of the Earth is so universal that a free rein was given to fancy, and in France one could read in the papers, under the title: “The Luminous Phenomenon of Cherbourg,” a series of the oddest and most contradictory descriptions. They spoke of an oval disc describing curves in the sky; the appearance of an electric meteor; a halo due to the deviation of the sun; of an illuminated captive balloon, of a new kind of maritime signals, of an unknown star, of a comet, even of a “constellation”!

And there was more to come. On the eleventh day of observation, April 11 (the strange apparition had commenced on April 1, and mariners might have thought of an April hoax), the maritime prefect of Cherbourg ordered the commander of the Chasseloup-Laubat to study the luminous phenomenon, A vessel was sent to look for Venus! The naval officers could not explain the mystery; one of them, however, wrote that it might be the planet Jupiter!

Other commanders, having heard of the comet discovered at the Nice Observatory by M. Giacobini, announced that the “unexplained light” might well be that comet! They did not know that that comet was a telescopic one, invisible to the naked eye.

In the night of April 10-11 a meteorite was seen at Tunis. The question arose whether it was not this meteorite which had first been seen every evening at Cherbourg!

The phenomenon was signalled from Perpignan, Montauban, Nantes, le Hâvre, La Réole, Amélie-les-Bains, etc.

And so on. Every sort of stupidity was given out on the subject.

Well, a star resplendent with light shone every evening in the western sky. It was Venus, the famous Shepherds’ Star. It was seen from every point of France, from Europe, Asia, the United States—and from Cherbourg as well. For three months it reigned on high every evening. It was also at its maximum brilliancy, and so bright that it cast a shadow, as we have said. And nobody at Cherbourg spoke of Venus, nobody compared with Venus the new star situated in the same region of the sky, nobody thought that this mysterious heavenly body might be none other than the radiant planet. Nobody seemed to know that Venus was there![1]

The story repeated itself from December 1912 to March 1913. Venus queened it over the first hours of the night, moving ever nearer to us and remaining a little longer every evening above the horizon.

On the very rare date recorded by the postmarks as 12-12-12 (12 Dec., 1912), the conjunction of Venus and the Moon attracted general attention, especially as the weather was fine. It was the same at the other conjunctions, January 1912, February 11, and March 11.

This association of radiant Venus with the lunar crescent in the evening sky offers to the eyes the most inspiring of spectacles.

The sensation caused at Cherbourg in the spring of 1905 by the brilliant star of the evening shining upon the sea and taken for a mysterious instrument of espionage was renewed in 1913, especially in England. Those who saw it, blinded by its radiant beauty, were led to confound the Shepherds’ Star with German airships, and accused them of espionage.

One could read, in fact, in the paper, that the authorities on the other side of the Channel were greatly alarmed by the nocturnal flight of mysterious dirigibles which came under cover of the shades of the evening and hovered over British ports. The cars and the balloons themselves were, so it was said, invisible on account of the darkness, but the powerful searchlights thrown upon the earth revealed the unusual presence of the aerial intruder!

At the same time we received from Russia similar stories of the fear inspired by Venus among the people, who professed to recognise in its bright light the fires of Austrian aeroplanes spying out the upper atmosphere.

In Roumania, Venus was taken for a Russian aeroplane; and in Bessarabia (Russia), rifle-shots were fired at the beautiful planet, in the belief that it was a Roumanian dirigible.

Yet it would be sufficient to use quite a small telescope or even a good opera-glass to correct this error, for Venus showed phases which would have immediately completed the identification, and certainly not allowed it to be confused with aerial vehicles.

Such popular emotions caused by the appearance of Venus are not confined to our own times. In December 1797 the young General Bonaparte, after his wonderful conquest of Italy, returned to Paris to receive from the Directory the honours which presaged the consulate. Attended by a brilliant staff, he was going on horseback to the palace of the Luxembourg, where the Directory awaited him, when he was surprised to see, in the Rue de Tournon, all the people who stood ready to greet him turn round and look at a point in the sky instead of looking at him. His aide-de-camp told him that a star shone in the sky and that the French saw in it the star of the conqueror of Italy. It was Venus, then at its maximum brightness. Political conditions have changed, but the star remains.

It was there in mythological times:

Venus Astarte, daughter of the sea,

Shook off her mother’s tears amid her fond caresses

And fertilised the earth in wringing out her tresses.

She was there, receiving the lovers’ holocausts within the temples consecrated to her in Greece, Egypt, India, all over the world, for it was from her brilliant or mysterious aspects of the morning and evening that the cult of her charming personality was derived. Even nowadays many an observer sees in her only a radiant beauty in an ethereal dwelling-place, and does not remember that science has explained the idol and transfigured the star.

From its greatest easterly elongation to its greatest westerly elongation the brightness of the planet is such that when it is not quite close to the sun it is usually seen with the naked eye in daylight. Its phases are always curious and interesting. Their discovery by Galileo was of great importance to the beginning of modern astronomy in proving that the planets are globes without light of their own, similar to the globe which we inhabit.

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Venus is no longer for us an allegorical symbol lost in the incense of the clouds and reigning over enslaved hearts; the Earth is no longer an inferior abode controlled by celestial influence; the horizon is grown wider, our planet has been liberated in unlimited space; Venus has become a celestial Earth, our sister and neighbour, and the better-informed eyes which contemplate it to-day see in her, not, like Homer and Manilius, a luminous point shining above our heads and controlling the feelings of our hearts and the movement of our blood, but a world corresponding to the world we ourselves inhabit, gravitating like us round the same sun, living on the same light and heat, and fit like ours to bear a thinking race for whom the Earth we inhabit is itself a star in the sky.

Venus, the brightest star which ever shines in the limpid glory of the western sky, is not a star, strictly speaking; it is a planet, a world like ours, and of the same size, which only shines by reflecting the Sun’s light into space. When one remembers that it is the same with us, and that, seen from the distance of some ten million miles, our Earth shines with a similar lustre, one is forced to admit that we are much more beautiful from afar than we are close by.

There is indeed no possible comparison between the two aspects. Seen close at hand, we are agitation, the struggle for existence, fight, battle, envy, jealousy, drama, hunger, often misery; seen from afar, we are calm, serenity, pure nobility, celestial light, almost an image of God! It is probably the same with Venus, so white and so radiant seen from here; possibly if we could go close to her, we should hear the cries of wild beasts in the forests, the battles of men devouring each other in so-called civilised lands, and we might witness geological and human revolutions, more formidable on account of the fact that Venus, younger than ourselves, is less advanced in evolution.

Being nearer the Sun than we and enveloped in a very dense atmosphere, Venus must have a higher temperature than the Earth. Its atmosphere is heavily charged with hot vapours. Its sky is always overcast; thunder and lightning must be never-ending. Electricity plays no doubt a prominent part. But, although many things are imperfect, there is good everywhere.

It is one of the charms of astronomy that it enables us to see through time as well as through space. Those who remain in ignorance of the elements of this science do not even know that they are depriving themselves of the most agreeable satisfactions of the mind. They are like travellers who pass through a wonderful landscape without even asking where they are. This planet consecrated to Venus, the goddess of beauty and love, who, in the days of ancient Greece, was said to have emerged from the waves to charm gods and men, and whose mythical history brings us such eloquent evidence of the influence of celestial aspects upon the origin of religions—this planet, we say, owes its terrestrial glory to its situation between the Earth and the Sun. While our globe gravitates round the Sun at the distance of 92 million miles, in a year of 365 days, Venus passes along the orbit contained within our own, at the distance of 65 million miles from the Sun, in a year numbering 225 days.

It follows that from time to time it passes between the Sun and ourselves, approaching to within 25 million miles or even less, since the two orbits are not circular, but elliptical.

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One of the finest achievements of astronomy is having made man a citizen of the heavens. The planet which we inhabit is a heavenly body, just as is Venus, Mars, or Jupiter, and far from occupying the centre of creation, it lies in the depths of infinite space as do the most distant stars of the Milky Way. Venus possesses no more light of her own than does the Earth; she simply receives the rays of the Sun and sheds them into space as the Moon does. Take, for instance, a small finder telescope and direct it towards Venus; you will see the form of a crescent. It is no longer Venus, but Diana. Take a rather more powerful telescope, and you will see that the border of this crescent is not regular, and the southern pole is blunted and rounded, while the northern pole is pointed. On increasing the power of your instrument you will perceive the atmosphere by the gradual transition between the illuminated hemisphere and the dark hemisphere, or by the blinding clouds and light shadows which fleck its disc.

If you go still farther and give yourself the pains and the pleasure of doing a few astronomical calculations, you will see that the diameter of its globe is just the same as that of the Earth—within one thousandth part!—but that Venus is a little lighter than the Earth, its density being only four-fifths of ours, whence it results that objects weigh a little less on its surface than they would on ours: 1,000 grammes transported on Venus would only weigh 880 grammes; on Mars they would weigh even less, viz. 376 grammes; and even less on the Moon, viz. 165 grammes. We are very heavy down here.

Astronomy alone teaches us that this young sister of ours is in communication with us, not only by means of light, but also by attraction, and that space, so far from being a separation between worlds, is a real link, an invisible hyphen. For example, when the distance between us and Venus is 25 million miles, light only takes 2½ minutes to cross that distance. Is that a serious separation? Even in France a telegram, in spite of its name, takes more than an hour to be delivered a few hundred miles away, on account of intermediate links. If astronomers ever succeeded in establishing celestial telegraphy, communication would be much more rapid between one world and another than between one part of modern Babylon and another. An interplanetary telephone would be almost instantaneous.

* * * * *

If the luminous beams from Venus to the Earth only take two or three minutes to reach us, according to its proximity, the attraction between the two planets is transmitted still more rapidly, for it does not even take a whole second. And just think! At the distance of millions of miles we feel the mysterious influence of Venus, we abandon for a moment the regular course of our orbit round the Sun to follow in her path. Celestial mechanics calculates this displacement and accounts for it in its determinations.

If the Sun were not the strongest, the two sister-planets, Earth and Venus, would gradually approach each other and would graze one another like two dragon-flies roaming together through the fields of the sky. But fortunately for us, the omnipotent Sun soon resumes its rights, and everything is restored back to order.

The years of Venus are shorter than ours. Their precise duration is 224 days 16 hours 49 minutes 8 seconds. We do not yet know the diurnal rotation, i.e. the length of its days. According to certain observations, this appears to be about 24 hours, while others indicate that this planet does not turn upon its axis at all, or rather, that its rotation is equal to its revolution and that it always turns the same side towards the Sun.

It is extremely difficult to determine its rotation, for two reasons. Firstly, because its atmosphere is very dense and always full of clouds, so that it is impossible to make out its geography and to follow in the telescope the displacement of its surface details; this is so easily done in the case of Mars, whose atmosphere is always clear, and whose rotation is known with perfect accuracy, its period being 24 hours 37 minutes 22½ seconds. The second reason is the difficulty presented by the phases of Venus. The closer the planet approaches us in its orbit round the Sun, the more does its disc apparently grow in size and the less we see of its surface, because it at the same time passes between the Sun and us, so that its illuminated hemisphere, being naturally turned towards the Sun which illuminates it, is hidden from us.

My personal observations lead me to believe that the period of rotation is about 24 hours. At the Juvisy observatory we have often observed and photographed snowy patches in the north and south, probably marking the extremes of an axis and therefore a rotation.

This special point is not yet decided. It is quite possible that the days are very long there, or rather, that they last for ever—perpetual day on one side and perpetual night on the other side. That would make it a very singular world. On one side light, heat, and life; on the other, the icy coldness of death. Some might choose for their abode perpetual sunlight; others might prefer a night illuminated perhaps by electric light; yet others might prefer to dwell in the dawn or the twilight. Beautiful Venus would then have one hemisphere in perpetual night and one in perpetual day. How strange! How our worlds must differ in the form of their organisms and the nature of their inhabitants!

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The science of the stars opens unexpected outlooks on extra-terrestrial life. We know already that Venus, the Earth, and Mars are three floating homes controlled by the same forces, governed by the same attraction and cradled in the fluctuation of the same magnetism. Regarded from this point of view, Venus is more interesting to us than she ever was in mythological times. Is not the knowledge of those celestial sympathies a first stage of the road leading to the conquests of other worlds?