THE EARTH AS SEEN FROM THE FURTHER PLANETS.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 2581, 26 January 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE EARTH AS SEEN FROM THE FURTHER PLANETS.

Tjik earth is surprisingly visible in the heavens of the planets that are near us, hut when reaching colossal Jupiter, which is at a mean distance of 495,000,000 miles from the sun, we cast a glance behind, our little globe no longer soars amid the celestial spaces. A neighbour of the sun almost eclipsed by its blinding rays, the earth oscillates butl'2deg. to the oast and west of the star of day. Feeble morning and evening star, she precedes its rising and follows its setting. If the inhabitants of Jupiter possess sight like ours they can scarcely see the earth except by artificial means. It is especially at the periods of our passages annually before the sun (five times smaller there than here) that the Jovian astronomers can discover our globe, under the aspect of a small black point moving over the solar disc. To Saturn, the earth is separated from the sun by but Gdeg-, and passes over it every fifteen days. To Uranus she is separated by 3dcg., and to Neptune by but 2deg. Immersed in a luminous fascicle of solar rays, our globe i 3 entirely invisible to these latter planets of the system to which it belongs. The earth is unknown to these worlds, which are relatively near and are connected, like it, with the destinies of the sun ; and the existence upon it of the people that inhabit it, of that intelligent race which believes itself to be alone in the universe, is suspected by no one. To these planets neighbouring our own, we do not exist. Seen from the nearest of the stars, the enormous suu that illuminates us is itself no more than a little point, no more than a minute star wandering in the infinite labyrinth of the worlds.—La Science Illustre.