Pluto's head! It was a star hurled by the
hand of the Creator, and fallen upon the lunar surface!

Tycho forms such a luminous concentration that the inhabitants of the
earth can see it without a telescope, although they are at a distance of
100,000 leagues. It will, therefore, be readily imagined what its
intensity must have been in the eyes of observers placed at fifty
leagues only.

Across this pure ether its brilliancy was so unbearable that Barbicane
and his friends were obliged to blacken the object-glasses of their
telescopes with gas-smoke in order to support it. Then, mute, hardly
emitting a few admirative interjections, they looked and contemplated.
All their sentiments, all their impressions were concentrated in their
eyes, as life, under violent emotion, is concentrated in the heart.

Tycho belongs to the system of radiating mountains, like Aristarchus and
Copernicus. But it testified the most completely of all to the terrible
volcanic action to which the formation of the moon is due.

Tycho is situated in south lat. 43 deg. and east long. 12 deg.. Its centre is
occupied by a crater more than forty miles wide. It affects a slightly
elliptical form, and is inclosed by circular ramparts, which on the east
and west overlook the exterior plain from a height of 5,000 metres. It
is an aggregation of Mont Blancs, placed round a common centre, and
crowned with shining rays.

Photography itself could never represent what this incomparable
mountain, with all its projections converging to it and its interior
excrescences, is really like. In fact, it is during the full moon that
Tycho is seen in all its splendour. Then all shadows disappear, the
foreshortenings of perspective disappear, and all proofs come out
white--an unfortunate circumstance, for this strange region would have
been curious to reproduce with photographic exactitude. It is only an
agglomeration of holes, craters, circles, a vertiginous network of
crests. It will be understood, therefore, that the bubblings of this
central eruption have kept their first forms. Crystallised by cooling,
they have stereotyped the aspect which the moon formerly presented under
the influence of Plutonic forces.

The distance which separated the travellers from the circular summits of
Tycho was not so great that the travellers could not survey its
principal details. Even upon the embankment which forms the ramparts of
Tycho, the mountains hanging to the interior and ex