Word: moons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...moon's great craters are extinct volcanoes and not meteoric pockmarks as many scientists have believed. So said Roy K. Marshall of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute. His reasoning: If the moon has no atmosphere at all, a one-inch meteorite traveling 20 miles a second would strike it with an explosion visible from the earth. About 1,000 meteors that size must have fallen moonward in the past century, but no explosion has been seen. Therefore, the moon must have enough atmosphere to consume them long before they could make pockmarks. Probably it is only one millionth...
...debris of the fantastically brilliant exploding star recorded by Chinese stargazers in 1054 A.D. now forms the Crab nebula. "This star shone temporarily ten times brighter than the moon," said Rudolph Minkowski of Mount Wilson Observatory, "and was visible for a full month in the daytime sky. It was . . . one of the three supernovae which have appeared in the Milky Way during the last thousand years. The others were Tycho's star in 1572, and Kepler's Nova of 1604." In Pasadena next day Minkowski's colleague, Walter Baade, announced finding the debris of Kepler...
...There is a vivid passage on the attempted invasion. "I'm sure that something happened on September 15 . . . . I woke up to hear our next door neighbour backing his car stealthily out of the garage . . . . I leant out the window. The night was calm and moonlit; the moon sparkled on the flat sea. And there was a subdued hum everywhere, far and near, as if hundreds of cars were on the roads and lanes. I was so restless . . . . I got up and dressed and went out, up the road a little way into the fields. I could hear, faintly...
...have grown used to this preliminary warning and pay little attention to it... probably it is only a lost plane trying to slip back to Norway; doubtless it will be shot down over the East Coast; maybe it's a reconnaissance! Somebody looks out to see what the moon is like, returning with the information that the moon, a luminous threequarter disk, throws its light over the entire city, and that there are low clouds in the clear sky. According to our experience this is an ideal night for a raid, and, anyway, we have had too long a break...
...Crescent moon and sickle going on before...