I mean that, apart from the polar compression, the shape seemed as if the spheroid were irregularly squeezed; so that though not broken by projection or indentation, the limb did not present the regular quasi-circular curvature exhibited in the focus of our telescopes.  Also, between the inner ring and the planet, with a power of 500, I discerned what appeared to be a dark purplish ring, semi-transparent, so that through it the bright surface of Saturn might be discerned as through a veil.  Mercury shone brightly several degrees outside the halo surrounding the Earth’s black disc; and Venus was also visible; but in neither case did my observations allow me to ascertain anything that has not been already noted by astronomers.  The dim form of Uranus was better defined than I had previously seen it, but no marking of any kind was perceptible.

Rising from my second, or, so to speak, midday rest, and having busied myself for some little time with what I may call my household and garden duties, I observed the discometer at 1h. (or 5 P.M.).  It indicated about two hundred terrestrial radii of elevation.  I had, of course, from the first been falling slightly behind the Earth in her orbital motion, and was no longer exactly in opposition; that is to say, a line drawn from the Astronaut to the Earth’s centre was no longer a prolongation of that joining the centres of the Earth and Sun.  The effect of this divergence was now perceptible.  The earthly corona was unequal in width, and to the westward was very distinctly brightened, while on the other side it was narrow and comparatively faint.  While watching this phenomenon through the lower lens, I thought that I could perceive behind or through the widest portion of the halo a white light, which at first I mistook for one of those scintillations that had of late become scarcely discernible.  But after a time it extended visibly beyond the boundary of the halo itself, and I perceived that the edge of the Sun’s disc had come at last into view.  It was but a minute and narrow crescent, but was well worth watching.  The brightening and broadening of the halo at this point I perceived to be due, not to the Sun’s effect upon the atmosphere that produced it, but chiefly to the twilight now brightening on that limb of the Earth’s disc; or rather to the fact that a small portion of that part of the Earth’s surface, where, if the Sun were not visible, he was but a very little below the horizon, had been turned towards me.  I saw through the telescope first a tiny solar crescent of intense brightness, then the halo proper, now exceedingly narrow, and then what looked like a silver terrestrial crescent, but a mere thread, finer and shorter than any that the Moon ever displays even to telescopic observers on Earth; since, when such a minute portion of her illuminated surface is turned towards the Earth, it is utterly extinguished to our eyes by the immediate vicinity of the Sun, as was soon the case with the terrestrial