The Moon

If a picture is worth a thousand words then this should suffice for my blog this week...right?  This is a composite of pictures taken of the moon during one lunation...one complete cycle of the moon.

Our poor moon.  Unlike all the other moons of all the other planets in our solar system our moon has no official English name.  It’s probably due to a natural human arrogance where we’ve always believed we were the center of the universe or at least deserve to be.  Most scientist refer to it by it’s latin name, Luna.

The moon has a rotational period that is the same as its orbital period which means that the same side always faces us (The same is true of Mercury and the Sun).  It was born at roughly the same time as the Earth 4.5 billion years ago and because the moon has no atmosphere the surface has remained mostly unchanged since then, at least for the light grey areas.  The exception to this is obviously all the craters from impacts by asteroids and comets and then there are the dark areas on the moon which are lava beds from volcanic activity that dried up about 3.5 billion years ago.

The Earth-moon system could almost be considered a double planetary system since the moon is roughly 1/6 the size of the earth.  That’s fairly large for a moon, relative to it’s parent planet.  In fact the Moon and Mercury are similar in size so the moon could be considered a planet.

It would not be a very nice place to visit though.  It’s 225 degrees during the day and -243 at night.  But the good news is that you may find some water in craters where comets have crashed that are so deep that the sun never reaches the bottom.  If so then you could build a giant “laser” there and threaten to destroy Washington DC unless they pay you $1 Million!!!! MuHahahahaha!