THOMAS GUTTERIDGE
The Moon is the Earth’s only natural satellite and is the largest natural satellite relative to it’s primary, in our solar system. It is in synchronus rotation with Earth, meaning that it almost always shows us on the Earth the same face. It’s the second brightest object that we see in the sky, after the sun and it’s gravatational influences, create our ocean’s tides. There has been much in the way of speculation and theories on how the Moon came into being, some 4.5 million years ago. With one prevailing theory since the mid 80’s. The Moon is an important cultural influence to many and has been since ancient times along with finding itself in fictional works.
It is made up of a crust, mantle and core, with the core being much smaller than Earth’s. It’s the second densest planet, after ‘lo’ one of the four moons of Jupiter. Our Moon can be seen to be pockmarked with craters and maria, latin for ‘seas’, which was what the dark areas were originally thought to be. Until it was discovered that they were solidified pools of balsaltic lava. There is no atmosphere on the Moon, so we cannot breath on its surface without the aid of a suit. You will also find that the gravity is much less than Earth’s. This is due to the Moon being smaller and has much less mass so it pulls with less gravity. If you stood on the surface of the Moon you would experience 17% of the force on Earth.
· Near side of the Moon
· Far side of the Moon, ‘Dark Side’
Galileo Galilei was an italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who contributed much to the scientific revolution. He was born on the 15th of febuary 1564 and died in 1642. Perhaps some of his most notable contributes were to observational astronomy with his own improvements to the telescope. They include the confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Galileo was the first to deduce that the ‘strange spottednesse’ in the waving of the crescent was down to light occlusion from Lunar mountains and craters. He also made charts estimating the heights of mountains. The Moon was not a perfect sphere as claimed by Aristotle. Galileo made a number of contributions to what is now known as technology, as distinct from pure physics. Between 1595 and 1598, Galileo devised and improved a Geometric and Military Compass suitable for use by gunners and surveyors. In about 1593, Galileo constructed a thermometer, using the expansion and contraction of air in a bulb to move water in an attached tube.
In 1609, Galileo was, along with Englishman Thomas Harriot and others, among the first to use a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe stars, planets or moons. The name “telescope” was coined for Galileo’s instrument by a Greek mathematician, Giovanni Demisiani. By 1624 Galileo had perfected a compound microscope. In 1612, having determined the orbital periods of Jupiter’s satellites, Galileo proposed that with sufficiently accurate knowledge of their orbits one could use their positions as a universal clock, and this would make possible the determination of longitude. He worked on this problem from time to time during the remainder of his life; but the practical problems were severe. The method was first successfully applied by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1681 and was later used extensively for large land surveys. In his last year, when totally blind, he designed an escapement mechanism for a pendulum clock (called Galileo’s escapement), a vectorial model of which may be seen here. The first fully operational pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s.
One thought was based around the idea that the Moon came from the Earth. Since observations of the Moon showed us that the Moon was not a perfect sphere as suggested by aristotle, we can see that it’s surface is in many ways, much like our Earth. So the theory goes, that at one point or another the Moon had been plucked from the Earth. From around the area of the Pacific Ocean this was supposed to have occured.
Another theory was that the Earth and the Moon came to be next eachother, though an accidental counter when flying through space, post ‘Big Bang’. They became entwined within eachother’s gravatational pull.
A third theory was that the Earth and the Moon were travelling through space and came to be beside eachother. Whilst they were together they both condensed, causing them to stay in eachother’s company.
The current prevailing theory, from the 1980’s, is known as ‘The Big Splat’. Early on two planets encountered eachother and collided, one being Proto Earth (Earth) and the other Theia (The Mother Of The Moon Goddess). Their iron cores became one and the crusts crumpled and went back into the Earth, only some of the debris crumpled on it’s own, creating was is now the Moon.
The Moon is in synchronous rotation: it rotates about its axis in about the same time it takes to orbit the Earth. This results in it nearly always keeping the same face turned towards the Earth. The Moon used to rotate at a faster rate, but early in its history, its rotation slowed and became tidally locked in this orientation as a result of frictional effects associated with tidal deformations caused by the Earth. The side of the Moon that faces Earth is called the near side, and the opposite side the far side. The far side is often called the “dark side�, but in fact, it is illuminated as often as the near side: once per lunar day, during the new moon phase we observe on Earth when the near side is dark. The Moon has an exceptionally low albedo, giving it a similar reflectance to coal. Despite this, it is the second brightest object in the sky after the Sun. This is partly due to the brightness enhancement of the opposition effect; at quarter phase, the Moon is only one-tenth as bright,
rather than half as bright, as at full moon. The Moon has an exceptionally low albedo, giving it a similar reflectance to coal. Despite this, it is the second brightest object in the sky after the Sun. This is partly due to the brightness enhancement of the opposition effect; at quarter phase, the Moon is only one-tenth as bright, rather than half as bright, as at full moon. Additionally, colour constancy in the visual system recalibrates the relations between the colours of an object and its surroundings, and since the surrounding sky is comparatively dark, the sunlit Moon is perceived as a bright object. The edges of the full moon seem as bright as the centre, with no limb darkening, due to the reflective properties of lunar soil, which reflects more light back towards the Sun than in other directions.
Eclipses can only occur when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are all in a straight line (termed “syzygy”). Solar eclipses occur at new moon, when the Moon is between the Sun and Earth. In contrast, lunar eclipses occur at full moon, when the Earth is between the Sun and Moon. The apparent size of the Moon is roughly the same as that of the Sun, with both being viewed at close to one-half a degree wide. The Sun is much larger than the Moon but it is the precise vastly greater distance that coincidentally gives it the same apparent size as the much closer and much smaller Moon from the perspective of the Earth. The variations in apparent size, due to the non-circular orbits, are nearly the same as well, though occurring in different cycles. This makes possible both total (with the Moon appearing larger than the Sun) and annular (with the Moon appearing smaller than the Sun) solar eclipses. In a total eclipse, the Moon completely covers the disc of the Sun and the solar corona becomes visible to the naked eye. Since the distance
between the Moon and the Earth is very slowly increasing over time,[103] the angular diameter of the Moon is decreasing. This means that hundreds of millions of years ago the Moon would always completely cover the Sun on solar eclipses, and no annular eclipses were possible. Likewise, about 600 million years from now (if the angular diameter of the Sun does not change), the Moon will no longer cover the Sun completely, and only annular eclipses will occur. Because the Moon’s orbit around the Earth is inclined by about 5° to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, eclipses do not occur at every full and new moon. For an eclipse to occur, the Moon must be near the intersection of the two orbital planes. The periodicity and recurrence of eclipses of the Sun by the Moon, and of the Moon by the Earth, is described by the saros cycle, which has a period of approximately 18 years. As the Moon is continuously blocking our view of a half-degreewide circular area of the sky, the related phenomenon of occultation
occurs when a bright star or planet passes behind the Moon and is occulted: hidden from view. In this way, a solar eclipse is an occultation of the Sun. Because the Moon is comparatively close to the Earth, occultations of individual stars are not visible everywhere on the planet, nor at the same time. Because of the precession of the lunar orbit, each year different stars are occulted.
A full moon occurs once every month, although every two to three years, two full moons will appear in one month. This occurance is called a ‘Blue Moon’. This usage results from a misinterpretation of the traditional definition of blue moon in the March 1946 issue of Sky and Telescope. Due to the rarity of a blue moon, the term “blue moon” is used colloquially to mean a rare event, as in the phrase “once in a blue moon”. Although a Blue Moon itself is not actually blue, it has been found that the colour of the Moon can be found to alter can be affected by atmospheric circumstances volcanic eruptions and exceptionally large fires
can leave particles in the atmosphere which give the sky, and thus the moon, a tinge of blue (or other colours). The most literal meaning of blue moon is when the moon (not necessarily a full moon) appears to a casual observer to be unusually bluish, which is a rare event. The effect can be caused by smoke or dust particles in the atmosphere, as has happened after forest fires in Sweden and Canada in 1950 and 1951 , and after the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, which caused the moon to appear blue for nearly two years. Other less potent volcanoes have also turned the moon blue. People saw blue moons in 1983 after the eruption of the El Chichón
volcano in Mexico, and there are reports of blue moons caused by Mount St. Helens in 1980 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991 . On September 23, 1950, several muskeg fires that had been smoldering for several years in Alberta, Canada, suddenly blew up into major—and very smoky—fires. Winds carried the smoke eastward and southward with unusual speed, and the conditions of the fire produced large quantities of oily droplets of just the right size (about 1 micrometre in diameter) to scatter red and yellow light. Wherever the smoke cleared enough so that the sun was visible, it was lavender or blue. Ontario, Canada, and much of the east coast of the United States were affected by the following day, and two days later, observers in Britain reported an indigo sun in smoke-dimmed skies, followed by an equally blue moon that evening. The key to a blue moon is having lots of particles slightly wider than the wavelength of red light (0.7 micrometre)—and no other sizes present. This is rare, but volcanoes sometimes produce such clouds, as do forest fires. Ash and dust clouds thrown into the atmosphere by fires and storms usually contain a mixture of particles with a wide range of sizes, with most smaller than 1 micrometre, and they tend to scatter blue light. This kind of cloud makes the moon turn red; thus red moons are far more common than blue moons. The March 1946 Sky and Telescope article “Once in a Blue Moon” by James Hugh Pruett misinterpreted the 1937 Maine Farmers’ Almanac. “Seven times in 19 years there were — and still are — 13 full moons in a year. This gives 11 months with one full moon each and one with two. This second in a month, so I interpret it, was called Blue Moon.” Widespread adoption of the definition of a “blue moon” as the second full moon in a
month followed its use on the popular radio program StarDate on January 31, 1980. One lunation (an average lunar cycle) is 29.53 days. There are about 365.25 days in a solar year. Therefore, about 12.37 lunations (365.25 days divided by 29.53 days) occur in a solar year. In the widely used Gregorian calendar, there are 12 months (the word month is derived from moon) in a year, and normally there is one full moon each month. Each calendar year contains roughly 11 days more than the number of days in 12 lunar cycles. The extra days accumulate, so every two or three years (7 times in the 19-year Metonic cycle), there is an extra full moon. The extra moon necessarily falls in one of the four seasons, giving that season four full moons instead of the usual three, and, hence, a blue moon. The term blue moon originates in deviations of the lunar calendar computed by the church, from the real moon. Different traditions place the extra “blue” full moon at different times: Different definitions: In calculating the dates for Lent and Easter, the Christian clergy identified a Lenten moon. Historically, when the moons arrived too early, they called the early moon a betrayer (belewe) moon, so the Lenten moon came at its expected time. Folklore named each of the 12 full moons in a year according to its time of year. The occasional 13th full moon that came too early for its season was called a blue moon, so that the rest of the moons that year retained their customary seasonal names. The Maine Farmers’ Almanac called the third full moon in a season that had four the blue moon. In modern use, when 13 full moons
occur in a year, usually one calendar month has 2 full moons; the second one is called a blue moon. On rare occasions in a calendar year (as happened in 2010), both January and March each have 2 full moons, so the the second one in each month is called a blue moon; in this case, the month of February, with only 28 or 29 days, has no full moon.
Full moon names are given to each moon in a season: For example, the English called the first moon of summer Hay Moon, the second is called Corn Moon, and the last is called Harvest Moon. When a season has four moons the third is called the blue moon so that the last can continue to be called with the proper name for that season.
The earliest recorded English usage of the term blue moon was in a 1524 pamphlet violently attacking the English clergy, entitled “Rede Me and Be Not Wrothe” (“Read me and be not angry”): “If they say the moon is belewe [blue] / We must believe that it is true.” Another interpretation uses a different definition of the Middle English word belewe, which, in addition to “blue”, can mean “betray”. By the 16th century, before the Gregorian calendar reform, the medieval computus was out of sync with the actual seasons and the moon, and occasionally spring would have begun and a full moon passed a month before the computus put the first spring moon. Thus, the clergy needed to tell the people whether the full moon was the Easter moon or a false one, which they may have called a “betrayer moon” (belewe moon) after which people would have had to continue fasting for another month in accordance with the season of Lent. Modern interpretation of the term relates to absurdities and impossibilities; the phrase “once in a blue moon” refers to an event that will take place only at incredibly rare occasions .
The division of the year into quarters starts with the nominal vernal equinox on or around March 21 .[8] This is close to the astronomical season but follows the Christian computus used for calculations of Easter, which places the equinox at a fixed date in the (Gregorian) calendar.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Maine Farmers’ Almanac listed blue moon dates for farmers. These correspond to the third full moon in a quarter of the year when there were four full moons (normally a quarter year has three full moons).
A ‘Harvest Moon’ is a full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal equinox. All full moons rise around the time of sunset. Because the moon orbits the earth in the same direction the earth is rotating, the moon rises later each day – on average about 50 minutes later each day (24/29.5 hours, or the number of hours in a solar day divided by the number of solar days it takes for the moon to orbit the earth). The Harvest Moon and Hunter’s Moon are unique because the time difference between moonrises on successive evenings is much shorter than average. The moon rises approximately 30 minutes later from one night to the next, as seen from about 40 degrees N. or S. latitude. Thus, there is no long period of darkness between sunset and moonrise for several days following
the actual date of the full moon. In times past this feature of these autumn moons was said to help farmers working to bring in their crops,[citation needed] or in the case of the Hunter’s Moon, hunters tracking their prey. They could continue being productive by moonlight even after the sun had set. Hence the name Harvest Moon. The reason for the shorterthan-usual rising time between successive moonrises around the time of the Harvest- and Hunter’s-Moon is that the plane of moon’s orbit around the earth makes a narrow angle with respect to the horizon in the evening in autumn. The Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox. About once every four years, it occurs in October in the northern
hemisphere. Currently, the latest possible Harvest Moon is on October 11. When the night of the Harvest Moon coincides with the night of the equinox, it is called a “Super Harvest Moon”. In 2010, the harvest moon happened only 5½ hours after the autumnal equinox, creating the first Super Harvest Moon since 1991. A harvest moon over Big Bend Ranch State Park, Texas Often, the Harvest Moon seems to be bigger or brighter or more colorful than other full moons. The warm color of the Moon shortly after it rises is caused by light from the Moon passing through a greater amount of atmospheric particles than when the moon is overhead. The atmosphere preferentially scatters the bluish component of moonlight, which is really reflected white light from the sun, while allowing more of the reddish component of the light to pass though to one’s eyes. Hence all celestial bodies look reddish when they are low in the sky. It appears larger in size because the brain perceives a lowhanging moon to be larger than one that’s high in the sky. This is known as a Moon illusion, and it can be seen with any full Moon. It can also be seen with constellations; in other words, a constellation viewed low in the sky will appear bigger than when it is high in the sky.
Man first set foot on the Moon in the year of 1969. Between the years 1969 and 1972 there have been six manned Moon landings, by the United States of America and numerous unmanned landings. The main drive for going to the Moon was more political than anything else. After WWII the two idealogically opposed superpowers became locked in a “Cold War” with both sides having developed a hydrogen bomb, creating a strained relationship between the two. A space race ensued between the United States and the Soviet Union after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 on 4th October 1957 becoming the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. The Soviets continued with their space achievements, sending the first rocket to ecape the Earth’s gravity into solar orbit, the first crash impact into the surface of the Moon and the first photography of the never before seen ‘dark side of the moon’. The American’s responded with greatly accelerating their military space and missile projects and created a civilian space agency, NASA.
To combat the Soviet’s Lunar program the U.S.A had the Apollo program. It was first conceived in the presidency of Eisenhower, but became dedicated by President Kennedy as the national goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely back to Earth by the end of the 1960’s. Kennedy’s goal was accomplished on the Apollo 11 mission when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their Lunar Module (LM) on the Moon on July 20, 1969 and walked on its surface while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the command spacecraft, and all three landed safely on Earth on July 24. Five subsequent Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the Moon, the last in December 1972. In these six spaceflights, 12 men walked on the Moon. Apollo ran from 1961 to 1972, and was supported by the two-man Gemini program which ran concurrently with it from 1962 to 1966. Gemini missions developed some of the space travel techniques that were necessary for the success of the Apollo missions. Apollo used
Saturn family rockets as launch vehicles. Apollo / Saturn vehicles were also used for an Apollo Applications program which consisted of three Skylab space station missions in 1973–74. Apollo succeeded despite the major setback of a 1967 Apollo 1 cabin fire that killed the entire crew during a pre-launch test. Six manned landings on the Moon were achieved. A seventh landing mission, the 1970 Apollo 13 flight, failed in transit to the Moon when an oxygen tank explosion disabled the command spacecraft’s propulsion and life support, forcing the crew to use the Lunar Module as a “lifeboat” for these functions to return to Earth safely. Apollo set several major human spaceflight milestones. It stands alone in sending manned missions beyond low Earth orbit; Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to orbit another celestial body, while the final Apollo 17 mission marked the sixth Moon landing and the ninth manned mission beyond low Earth orbit. The program returned 842 pounds (382 kg) of lunar rocks and soil to Earth, greatly contributing to the understanding of lunar geology. The program laid the foundation for NASA’s current human spaceflight capability, and funded construction of its Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center. Apollo also spurred advances in many areas of technology incidental to rocketry and manned spaceflight, including avionics, telecommunications, and computers. In total, twenty-four American astronauts have traveled to the Moon. Three have made the trip twice, and twelve have walked on its surface. Apollo 8 was a lunarorbit-only mission, Apollo 10 included undocking and Descent Orbit Insertion (DOI), followed by LM staging to CSM redocking, while Apollo 13, originally scheduled as a landing, ended up
as a lunar fly-by, by means of free return trajectory; thus, none of these missions made landings. Apollo 7 and Apollo 9 never left Earth orbit. Apart from the inherent dangers of manned Moon expeditions as seen with Apollo 13, one reason for their cessation according to astronaut Alan Bean is the cost it imposes in government subsidies.
The Moon has been the subject of many works of art and literature and the inspiration for countless others. It is a motif in the visual arts, the performing arts, poetry, prose and music. According to folklore: It is lucky to hold a moonstone in your mouth at the full moon and it is said that it will reveal the future. It is unlucky to sleep in the moonlight, or worse, be born in the moonlight. To see the crescent moon over your right shoulder was considered lucky, but to see it over your left shoulder was unlucky. If you move to a new home during a waning moon, you will certainly never go hungry. Some say that a the eyes of a cat will be open wider during a full moon than at any other time. The term “moon struck” originally meant a person was chosen by the Goddess and the person was said to be blessed.
During my time working at a reference answer desk, one of the most often asked questions was, When is the next full moon. So, I’m including a list of the full moon dates for November and December as well as all of 2010. A werewolf, also known as a lycanthrope (from the Greek λυκάνθρωπος: λύκος, lykos, “wolf”, and νθρωπος, anthrōpos, “man”), is a mythological or folkloric human with the ability to shapeshift into a wolf or an anthropomorphic wolf-like creature, either purposely or after being placed under a curse and/or lycanthropic affliction via a bite or scratch from a werewolf, or some other means. This transformation is often associated with the appearance of the full moon, as popularly noted by the medieval chronicler Gervase of Tilbury, and perhaps in earlier times among the ancient Greeks through the writings of Petronius.
1) There’s actually four kinds of lunar months Our months correspond approximately to the length of time it takes our natural satellite to go through a full cycle of phases. From excavated tally sticks, researchers have deduced that people from as early as the Paleolithic period counted days in relation to the moon’s phases. But there are actually four different kinds of lunar months. The durations listed here are averages. 1. Anomalistic – the length of time it takes the moon to circle the Earth, measured from one perigee (the closest point in its orbit to Earth) to the next: 27 days, 13 hours, 18 minutes, 37.4 seconds. 2. Nodical – the length of time it takes the moon to pass through one of its nodes (where it crosses the plane of the Earth’s orbit) and return to it: 27 days, 5 hours, 5 minutes, 35.9 seconds. 3. Sidereal – the length of time it takes the moon to circle the Earth, using the stars as a reference point: 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes, 11.5 seconds. 4. Synodical – the length of time it takes the moon to circle the Earth, using the sun as the reference point (that is, the time lapse between two successive conjunctions with the sun – going from new moon to new moon): 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2.7 seconds. It is the synodic month that is the basis of many calendars today and is used to divide the year.
2) We see slightly more than half of the moon from Earth Most reference books will note that
because the moon rotates only once during each revolution about the Earth, we never see more than half of its total surface. The truth, however, is that we actually get to see more of it over the course of its elliptical orbit: 59 percent (almost three-fifths). The moon’s rate of rotation is uniform but its rate of revolution is not, so we’re able to see just around the edge of each limb from time to time. Put another way, the two motions do not keep perfectly in step, even though they come out together at the end of the month. We call this effect libration of longitude. So the moon “rocks” in the east and west direction, allowing us to see farther around in longitude at each edge than we otherwise could. The remaining 41 percent can never be seen from our vantage point; and if anyone were on that region of the moon, they would never see the Earth.
3) It would take hundreds of thousands of moons to equal the brightness of the sun The full moon shines with a magnitude of -12.7, but the sun is 14 magnitudes brighter, at -26.7. The ratio of brightness of the sun versus the moon amounts to a difference of 398,110 to 1. So that’s how many full moons you would need to equal the brightness of the sun. But this all a moot point, because there is no way that you could fit that many full moons in the sky. The sky is 360 degrees around (including the half we can’t see, below the horizon), so there are over 41,200 square degrees in the sky. The moon measures only a half degree across, which gives it an area of only 0.2 square degrees. So you could fill up the entire sky, including the half that lies below our feet, with 206,264 full moons — and still come
up short by 191,836 in the effort to match the brightness of the sun.
4) The first- or last-quarter moon is not one half as bright as a full moon If the moon’s surface were like a perfectly smooth billiard ball, its surface brightness would be the same all over. In such a case, it would indeed appear half as bright. But the moon has a very rough topography. Especially near and along the day/night line (known as the terminator), the lunar landscape appears riddled with innumerable shadows cast by mountains, boulders and even tiny grains of lunar dust. Also, the moon’s face is splotched with dark regions. The end result is that at first quarter, the moon appears only one eleventh as bright as when it’s full. The moon is actually a little brighter at first quarter than at last quarter, since at that phase some parts of the moon reflect sunlight better than others.
5) A 95-percent illuminated moon appears half as bright as a full moon Believe it or not, the moon is half as bright as a full moon about 2.4 days before and after a full moon. Even though about 95 percent of the moon is illuminated at this time, and to most casual observers it might still look like a “full” moon, its brightness is roughly 0.7 magnitudes less than at full phase, making it appear one-half as bright.
6) The Earth, seen from the moon, also goes through phases However, they are opposite to the lunar phases that we see from the Earth. It’s a full Earth when it’s
new moon for us; last-quarter Earth when we’re seeing a first-quarter moon; a crescent Earth when we’re seeing a gibbous moon, and when the Earth is at new phase we’re seeing a full moon. From any spot on the moon (except on the far side, where you cannot see the Earth), the Earth would always be in the same place in the sky. From the moon, our Earth appears nearly four times larger than a full moon appears to us, and – depending on the state of our atmosphere – shines anywhere from 45 to 100 times brighter than a full moon. So when a full (or nearly full) Earth appears in the lunar sky, it illuminates the surrounding lunar landscape with a bluish-gray glow. From here on the Earth, we can see that glow when the moon appears to us as a crescent; sunlight illuminates but a sliver of the moon, while the rest of its outline is dimly visible by virtue of earthlight. Leonardo da Vinci was the first to figure out what that eerie glow appearing on the moon really was.
7) Eclipses are reversed when viewing from the moon Phases aren’t the only things that are seen in reverse from the moon. An eclipse of the moon for us is an eclipse of the sun from the moon. In this case, the disk of the Earth appears to block out the sun. If it completely blocks the sun, a narrow ring of light surrounds the dark disk of the Earth; our atmosphere backlighted by the sun. The ring appears to have a ruddy hue, since it’s the combined light of all the sunrises and sunsets occurring at that particular moment. That’s why during a total lunar eclipse, the moon takes on a ruddy or coppery glow.
When a total eclipse of the sun is taking place here on Earth, an observer on the moon can watch over the course of two or three hours as a small, distinct patch of darkness works its way slowly across the surface of the Earth. It’s the moon’s dark shadow, called the umbra, that falls on the Earth, but unlike in a lunar eclipse, where the moon can be completely engulfed by the Earth’s shadow, the moon’s shadow is less than a couple of hundred miles wide when it touches the Earth, appearing only as a dark blotch.
8) There are rules for how the moon’s craters are named The lunar craters were formed by asteroids and comets that collided with the moon. Roughly 300,000 craters wider than 1 km (0.6 miles) are thought to be on the moon’s near side alone. These are named for scholars, scientists, artists and explorers. For example, Copernicus Crater is named for Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer who realized in the 1500s that the planets move about the sun. Archimedes Crater is named for the Greek mathematician Archimedes, who made many mathematical discoveries in the third century B.C. The custom of applying personal names to the lunar formations began in 1645 with Michael van Langren, an engineer in Brussels who named the moon’s principal features after kings and great people on the Earth. On his lunar map he named the largest lunar plain (now known as Oceanus Procellarum) after his patron, Phillip IV of Spain. But just six years later, Giovanni Battista Riccioli of Bologna completed his own great lunar map, which removed the names bestowed by Van Langren and instead derived names chiefly from those of famous
astronomers — the basis of the system which continues to this day. In 1939, the British Astronomical Association issued a catalog of officially named lunar formations, “Who’s Who on the Moon,” listing the names of all formations adopted by the International Astronomical Union. Today the IAU continues to decide the names for craters on our moon, along with names for all astronomical objects. The IAU organizes the naming of each particular celestial feature around a particular theme. The names of craters now tend to fall into two groups. Typically, moon craters have been named for deceased scientists, scholars, explorers, and artists who’ve become known for their contributions to their respective fields. The craters around the Apollo crater and the Mare Moscoviense are to be named after deceased American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts.
9) The moon encompasses a huge temperature range If you survey the Internet for temperature data on the moon, you’re going to run into quite a bit of confusion. There’s little consistency even within a given website in which temperature scale is quoted: Celsius, Fahrenheit, even Kelvin. We have opted to use the figures that are quoted by NASA on its Website: The temperature at the lunar equator ranges from an extremely low minus 280 degrees F (minus 173 degrees C) at night to a very high 260 degrees F (127 degrees C) in the daytime. In some deep craters near the moon’s poles, the temperature is always near minus 400 degrees F (minus 240 degrees C). During a lunar eclipse, as the
moon moves into the Earth’s shadow, the surface temperature can plunge about 500 degrees F (300 degrees C) in less than 90 minutes. 10) The moon has its own time zone It is possible to tell time on the moon. In fact, back in 1970, Helbros Watches asked Kenneth L. Franklin, who for many years was the chief astronomer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium, to design a watch for moon walkers that measures time in what he called “lunations,” the period it takes the moon to rotate and revolve around the Earth; each lunation is exactly 29.530589 Earth days. For the moon, Franklin developed a system he called “lunar mean solar time,” or Lunar Time (LT). He envisioned local lunar time zones similar to the standard time zones of Earth, but based on meridians that are 12-degrees wide (analogous to the 15-degree intervals on Earth). “They will be named unambiguously as ‘36-degree East Zone time,’ etc., although ‘Copernican time,’ ‘West Tranquillity time’ and others may be adopted as convenient.” A lunar hour was defined as a “lunour,” and decilunours, centilunours and millilunours were also introduced. Interestingly, one moon watch was sent to the president of the United States at the time, Richard M. Nixon, who sent a thank you note to Franklin. The note and another moon watch were kept in a display case at the Hayden Planetarium for several years. Quite a few visitors would openly wonder why Nixon was presented with a wristwatch that could be used only on the moon.
‘For The Crater Good’ A book about the Moon by Thomas Gutteridge
Contact Details: spillyourgutts@gmail.com www.spillyourgutts.com
Facts and information about the Moon were found from various internet sources, such as Wikipedia and information from ‘In Our Time’ BBC Radio 4 program on the Moon.
THOMAS GUTTERIDGE