| 9. |
The earth, which reached nearly to the large square on the previous page, now
fits into the small square. The distance we have had to travel straight up, to get
its size thus reduced, is tremendous: according to our reckoning in drawings 4
and 5, we should be now 500,000 kilometers up, or about 312,500 miles -
more than the distance to the moon. From here we see the earth as a planet
spinning counterclockwise in the empty, dark, surrounding space. The sun, in
the south, makes it shed its shadow toward the north. Two faint dotted lines
mark the limits of this "umbra" (1). Another dotted line (2) gives the path along
which the earth moves, from right to left. Many faraway stars would be visible,
but these are left out in this drawing and others that follow, to concentrate attention
on our "immediate surroundings".
|
1 cm. in picture = 109 cm. = 10,000 km. | Scale = 1:1,000,000,000 = 1:109 |
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