that part of an astronomical body facing away from the nearest star; cf. darkside n. 1, farside n.
The day side of the Moon is exposed to the Sun’s intense heat for a fortnight at a stretch, the temperature rising very high, probably reaching the boiling point, whilst through the long lunar night of a fortnight, the surface freezes in the icy cold, the temperature of the night side of the Moon falling very low, perhaps to 200 or 250 below zero.
Only to the astronomer, ic Dalfca, did the unbroken darkness of Earth’s night-side have a sad significance.
He mused; his shack had been situated rather nearer the hot edge of the twilight zone; it was a trifle over two hundred and fifty miles to the shadow line, though of course that varied with the libration. But one couldn’t approach the line too closely, anyway, because of the fierce, almost inconceivable, storms that raged where the hot upper winds encountered the icy blasts of the night side, giving rise to the birth throes of the ice barrier.
They must have landed on the nightside of the artificial asteroid, for he could see the blazing corona of the sun eclipsed by the sphere on which he was standing.
The Thunderer went up, came down four hundred miles within the night-side. The tactic, decided Leigh, represented a right smart piece of figuring. Aroused aliens on the day-side would now require about twelve days to reach them.
We saw the lights of their cities—towns, at least—as soon as we had a good view of the nightside.
Coming in from the nightside—heading straight for Mount Zeus.
City lights glittering on the nightside and winking out as daylight raced across the planetary surface.
New windows opened to display telemetry, a CAD animation showing the attitude of the hopper and a rotating globe of the Moon displaying trajectories with a targeting cross over Daedalus Crater on the nightside.
Dayside showed grasslands and deep-green forests, punctuated by bright blue lakes. Nightside showed frozen lakes and dead gray forest.
antedating 1914
John R. Kippax, 'The Call of the Stars'
Last modified 2020-12-18 15:17:07
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