The Moon The Moon is our closest neighbor, around 500,000 kilometers from us here on the Earth... If you asked anyone, "what's the first thing you think of in the night sky?"... chances are they'll say, "The Moon"... It's been there since the beginning of the Earth... and always been around to fire the imagination of man.... Cave men, medicine men, shaman, priests, tribesmen, fishermen, navigators, scientists, women.... To each and everyone of us the Moon has played a special part in who we are how we have evolved as a race, our ways, our practices, our society... All this and we only managed to touch it in the last 40 years of history. Early humans, looked up into the sky in wonder, thier questions to remain unanswered for thousands of generations... This Mysterious Orb that changed it's shape from Crescent to Full to Crescent always the same pattern, always 28 days to complete this cycle and always the same face turned towards us, How did the moon come be all that it is? Planetary scientists, belive that early in the history of Earth, when this planet was a huge molten ball of minerals, gases and elements, that a large body, possibly another small planet, hurtled into the earth, plunging right through! The result, a huge amount of Earth was thrown out the opposite side of Earth from that of the impact point... This huge "Blob" of earth was cast out into space and settled into a slowly receding orbit around Earth. The Moon is slightly egg shaped, the "bottom" of this shape is heavier and gravity keeps it facing Earth. The Moon also has the very real effect on us, in that the Moon's Gravity pulls on us and "Drags" the oceans along with it, this gives us the "Tides".... Millions of years ago the Moon was only half the distance away and would have been twice the size it appears today! Imagine what a full Moon would be like back then! To us, if we measure it with a protractor it's roughly a half a degree accross in the sky... curiously,...so is the Sun... So when we get the right conditions and we have a Total Eclipse of the Sun, the Moon is a perfect fit.... This does vary though, because the Moons orbit is not completely round, no orbit is, the Moon's orbit is an Ellipse and if it's at its furthest from us and smaller in the sky during a Solar Eclipse, then the sun is not Totally hidden, we have what's called an "anuller"eclipses.... There is so much to discover about the Moon... Go to your libary and look it up... and Come to a show on a night of the Moon... Back to Comets

In this image of the moon, the colours have been enhanced and helps to demonstrates that various minerals lay on its surface. Cratering and lava flows over billions of years have given the moon its extraordinary surface features. Normally when you look at the Moon your eyes only see it as white and some shades of grey. This illusion is probably because the Moon is so bright in the dark night sky, that your eyes just see it as mostly white. Earth Rise over the Moon,... this picture taken from a window of the command module of Apollo 11, N.A.S.A's first mission that landed men on the Moon in 1969. Notice the colour of the Lunar surface and the craters... It's brown with a purple hue... Also for the first time, We, the human race where able to look back at our home planet, Earth, from the sky above another world and see our home as a small blue ball, just sitting in the darkness of space.... Beautiful, self contained, fragile.... Vulnerable.