Under the desert stars

by Frank Koester

The volcanoes Villarion, Liaima and Lanin spouted flames more than a thousand feet from their craters, while the activities of other volcanoes killed thousands of people. Six new craters opened in Mount Isalco, Salvador; the volcano Kilauea in Hawaii spouted mountains of lava, which darkened the sky and earthquakes shook many parts of the earth. During the last three thousand years thirteen million people have met their deaths by volcano and earthquake.

Cyclones, hailstorms and floods wiped out many towns in various parts of the world; in Pueblo alone they caused damage aggregating more than ten million dollars. Many lives were lost in waterspouts, which destroyed part of Tangier, Morocco, and in the Maia-Doura province in Spain.

Heat caused the glaciers of the Alps to melt and move at an alarming speed, while lakes in Switzerland dried up, exposing their bottoms and showing foundations of the homes of the lake-dwellers living there thousands of years ago.

While the sun is the nearest of the stars, the moon is the nearest of the heavenly bodies. It is about two hundred and forty thousand miles from the earth and has a diameter of about twenty-two hundred miles, or about one-quarter that of the earth. The moon, accompanying the earth in its movement around the sun, rotates on its axis once in twenty-nine and a half days and moves in a small orbit, once in twenty-seven and a third days, around the earth at a speed of nearly twenty-three hundred miles per hour. The moon shines merely by reflected light from the sun, whose light is six hundred thousand times brighter than that of the moon. The moon has a temperature of two hundred degrees below zero, Fahrenheit.

The surface of the moon structure, for the most part, is extremely broken. There are hills or mountains, but the surface is pitted all over with great “craters,” ranging from fifty to one hundred miles in diameter; there being a few with a diameter of more than one thousand miles. A counterpart of this is hardly to be found on our earth, yet it is believed that the moon was once part of this earth, becoming separated from the parent body by the tremendous centrifugal force of the earth; as it is likewise assumed that Jupiter will in time throw off its “great red spot” thus forming a new moon of Jupiter.

It is believed that the planet Mars, which has two moons, is inhabited and that it has great irrigation canals, which engineers say are far superior to any irrigation system on earth. During the last sun spot period wireless signals were supposed to have been received from Mars.

From time to time, bodies very different from the stars and planets appear in the heavens, remaining visible for some weeks or months and then vanish in the distance. These are the comets. The larger ones are magnificent objects, sometimes as bright as Venus and visible by day, with a head as large as the moon and having a train or tail extending behind it from the horizon to the zenith and which is in reality long enough to reach from the earth to the sun.

Such comets, however, are rare, and in ancient and medieval times comets were always regarded with terror—as an evil omen—and at times the people believed that they foretold the end of the world, causing veritable panics, like the “comet scare” of France in 1832. As a rule these comets reappear at intervals, such as do Halley’s, Euke’s and Donati’s comets. They travel at a tremendous speed, coming at times quite close to the earth. Quite often they cross the path of the earth, causing fear that a collision might take place. There are a few isolated cases of comets colliding with the earth and killing a few people. Some of the comets have been lost, that is we do not know what became of them. Such a lost wanderer of the skies is Biela’s comet; a comet of some forty thousand miles diameter. In its appearances, every sixth and sixteenth year, its course would come within a few thousand miles of the earth’s orbit.

Besides the luminous clouds we see in the heavens and which, under the telescope are shown to be but great groups of separate stars, there are others which no telescopic power has as yet been able to disclose individually. These are known as nebulae and are of varying shape and form and very beautiful in appearance.

Once in a while the earth passes through such a nebulae. Some years ago the Heidelberg Observatory reported that the earth was passing through some such nebulae, which report was confirmed by various other observatories. In that case there was no noticeable effect on human life, but it is believed by astronomers that some of these nebulae are composed of strong poisonous gases and that if ever the earth passes through such a nebulae all life on this planet will be destroyed.