A closer look at our own Moon

Its been a busy run up to Christmas, so this post is a little behind my intended schedule. I posted an image of the “Dark” side of the moon on Facebook recently and mentioned that until the last 50 years we had no idea what it actually looked like. I’ve continued to research the Moon and thought I’d share some of my observations. The purposed behind this article is to prepare some material for an upcomming podcast discussing “Naked Eye” astronomy. Here we go!

Orbit of the Moon:
One of the first things about the moon is that it sometimes appears to be bigger in the sky at various times of the year. Someone once told me this was due to atmosphere etc, but thats not quite true. The Moons orbit is elipical so it is closer at various times and it is visibly bigger depending on where it is in its orbit. Take a look below.

Apogee/Perigee and the size of the Moon

The Moons perigee, is the closest point in its elliptical orbit as apposed to its apogee, the farthest point in the lunar orbit. The difference in apparent size between the largest and smallest Full Moon is quite dramatic but since it changes over months, its hard to notice the change, and many people don’t see it. At its closest point, the Moon gets to 363,104 km (225,622 miles), and at its furthest point, it’s 405,696 km (252,088 miles).

There is such a thing as a BLUE MOON. When a month has two full moons, the second full moon is called a blue moon. Another definition of a blue moon is the third full moon in any season (quarter of year) containing 4 total full moons. The next Blue Moon is December 31st . The Moon is not actually blue… Here is an online calculator.

You also know that we only see one side of the moon and here is a nice youtube video explaining why that is true. The remarkable thing about it is that the moon rotates at the same speed it takes to orbit the earth.

Dark side of the Moon:

The first space craft to send back pictures from the moon was Luna 3 (built by the Soviet Union) in October 1959. Until then it was all speculation. Here is a nice image

Dark side of the Moon

Apollo Landing sites:

Apollo Landing sites

There were in total 6 Apollo missions successful in landing astronauts on the moon. This occurred on the following missions: Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17.

Apollo 10 went to the moon and descended the lunar excursion module (LEM) to several thousand feet short of a landing, but did not touch down. NASA had actually not filled the Ascent Module with enough fuel for them to land, just in case they got the urge to do land, against the flight plan. This was done as a preparatory step for the next mission, Apollo 11, where Neil Armstrong actually executed the first touch down on the moon with only 17 seconds to spare in his fuel tank. Apollo 13 suffered an explosion in transit and was forced to abort its landing and luckily returned to the Earth safely.

Apollo 17

The following is a rerelease of the Time Magazine Image of the Century from 1966.

Life Magazine's "Image of the Century" from 1966

Finally, do you want to know your way around the moon? Here is a nice site that allows you to discover the names of places on the moon. It is a very nice interactive image of the moon.

Finally, here are some of my favourite shots. The earth and moon as seen from Mars Orbiter.