the objects. Such was the _Mappa
Selenographica_ of Boeer and Moedler which Barbicane consulted. This
northern hemisphere presented vast plains, relieved by isolated
mountains.

At midnight the moon was full. At that precise moment the travellers
ought to have set foot upon her if the unlucky asteroid had not made
them deviate from their direction. The orb was exactly in the condition
rigorously determined by the Cambridge Observatory. She was
mathematically at her perigee, and at the zenith of the twenty-eighth
parallel. An observer placed at the bottom of the enormous Columbiad
while it is pointed perpendicularly at the horizon would have framed the
moon in the mouth of the cannon. A straight line drawn through the axis
of the piece would have passed through the centre of the moon.

It need hardly be stated that during the night between the 5th and 6th
of December the travellers did not take a minute's rest. Could they have
closed their eyes so near to a new world? No. All their feelings were
concentrated in one thought--to see! Representatives of the earth, of
humanity past and present, all concentrated in themselves, it was
through their eyes that the human race looked at these lunar regions and
penetrated the secrets of its satellite! A strange emotion filled their
hearts, and they went silently from one window to another.

Their observations were noted down by Barbicane, and were made
rigorously exact. To make them they had telescopes. To control them they
had maps.

The first observer of the moon was Galileo. His poor telescope only
magnified thirty times. Nevertheless, in the spots that pitted the lunar
disc "like eyes in a peacock's tail," he was the first to recognise
mountains, and measure some heights to which he attributed,
exaggerating, an elevation equal to the 20th of the diameter of the
disc, or 8,000 metres. Galileo drew up no map of his observations.

A few years later an astronomer of Dantzig, Hevelius--by operations
which were only exact twice a month, at the first and second
quadrature--reduced Galileo's heights to one-twenty-sixth only of the
lunar diameter. This was an exaggeration the other way. But it is to
this _savant_ that the first map of the moon is due. The light round
spots there form circular mountains, and the dark spots indicate vast
seas which, in reality, are plains. To these mountains and extents of
sea he gave terrestrial denominations. There is a Sinai in the middle of
an