Word: lunar
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...agitated question of whether the all-embracing Universe is expanding or not. Grey old Ernest W. Brown, professor emeritus of mathematics at Yale and a famed authority on the moon, who complacently smoked a pipe in violation of the Society's house rules, reported that the measurements of lunar motion which he started making a half-century ago have recently been rechecked with the help of modern calculating machines. Dr. Brown remarked with evident amusement that only two extremely slight errors had been found, both amounting to less than 1/100 of a second of arc on the curve...
...appears to have tracked down this lunar divagation, which he calls the "X factor," is Dr. James Robertson of the Naval Observatory, who has been prophesying eclipses for 26 years. Dr. Robertson now believes the "X factor" to be a resultant of three irregularity cycles, one of a lunar month, one of eleven to 13 months, the third varying over a long period up to 70 years. According to first reports from Canton Island, Dr. Robertson's time predictions for that spot, allowing for the "X factor," had hit the actual eclipse times on the nose...
Another factor affecting totality duration is that the shadow travels slowest at noon, fastest near the beginning and end of the eclipse day. Earth rotates eastward at about 1,040 m.p.h. at the Equator. The moon's eastward orbit carries the lunar shadow in the same direction at just about twice that speed, so that it rapidly overtakes the terrestrial rotation. At noon, when the shadow is perpendicular, the speed is 1,060 m.p.h.; earlier and later, when the cone of darkness impinges at an angle, it goes faster-depending on the acuteness of the angle...
...another prophetic sketch prepared. This showed the great Golden Gate Bridge fallen in neglected ruins, San Francisco's skyscrapers abandoned, the city housed in vast, uniform, flat-topped buildings; an "Orient Express" plane arriving at an airport on top of a slender, mile-high column while a "lunar local" rocket-ship takes off below; a teacher & class flying around under their own power on "magnetic refractor shoes." In the accompanying text a German professor is credited with having removed, by a magical serum, "all dishonesty, crime and conflict from the human brain...
...western mountain ranges. When this cold corpse of a satellite has crept 50% closer, a menacing bulge will be sucked out of its earthward face by terrestrial attraction. It will grow to a giant disk covering one-twentieth of the sky, lighting the night with baleful splendor. The lunar mountains, four miles high, will crack and crumble. Earth will shudder, open tremendous crevasses. The rain of moon fragments, falling as meteorites heated by atmospheric friction, will make steaming cauldrons of the seas, a smoking ruin of the land. At 20,000 miles what remains of the moon will break...