Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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I Sometimes Even Observed, Between
The Fifteenth Degree Of Latitude And The Equator, Small Halos
Around The Planet Venus; The Purple, Orange, And Violet, Were
Distinctly Perceived:
But I never saw any colours around Sirius,
Canopus, or Acherner.
While the halo was visible at Cumana, the hygrometer denoted great
humidity; nevertheless the vapours appeared so perfectly in
solution, or rather so elastic and uniformly disseminated, that
they did not alter the transparency of the atmosphere. The moon
arose after a storm of rain, behind the castle of San Antonio. As
soon as she appeared on the horizon, we distinguished two circles:
one large and whitish, forty-four degrees in diameter; the other a
small circle of 1 degree 43 minutes, displaying all the colours of
the rainbow. The space between the two circles was of the deepest
azure. At four degrees height, they disappeared, while the
meteorological instruments indicated not the slightest change in
the lower regions of the air. This phenomenon had nothing
extraordinary, except the great brilliancy of the colours, added to
the circumstance, that, according to the measures taken with
Ramsden's sextant, the lunar disk was not exactly in the centre of
the haloes. Without this actual measurement we might have thought
that the excentricity was the effect of the projection of the
circles on the apparent concavity of the sky.
If the situation of our house at Cumana was highly favourable for
the observation of the stars and meteorological phenomena, it
obliged us to be sometimes the witnesses of painful scenes during
the day.
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