The Man In The Moon

The-Man-On-The-Moon.

       The Man-in-the-Moon lives in a strange place indeed. He has no companions of any kind and must always gaze out upon a rough, barren country. Yet, in spite of these peculiarities, he is very popular and much discussed in song and story.
       The peoples of ancient times thought of the moon as something mysterious and sacred because they could not explain the changes that took place each month in its appearance. To many it was a comrade god of the sun and offerings were made to it. The Iranians called it The Eye of God and when a sheep or goat was offered as a sacrifice, the right eye of the animal was the share of the  moon.
       Today, the influence of the moon is still important in many lands. The Tyrolese begin no work in house, barn, field, or woods until the moon has been studied, while in parts of England and Scotland courtesies are made to a new moon and children are told that it is wicked to point a finger at it. Farmers of our own land often say that an especially fine crop of potatoes is good because the seed potatoes were planted in the dark of the moon.
       The planet of which the Man is a part is closer to the earth than any other planet. Just as the sun is closer to the earth at some times than at others, so the moon varies in its distance from our planet. At times, the moon is 221,436 miles away, and at other times it is 253,263 miles distant.
       It takes the moon 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes and 113 seconds to make a complete trip around our earth. As it takes the same length of time to make one turn on its axis, only one side of the moon is seen from the earth. No one knew the appearance of the other side until there was space exploration.
       The surface of the moon is made up of plains and mountains, volcanoes, cup-shaped depressions, and rills or deep cuts. The mountains are very high, with sharp points. They do not have the rains and winds and frosts of the earth to break off parts and carry them to the lowlands as do our mountains. There are no clouds, no water, and no atmosphere on the moon. Can you imagine a place that has no lovely, soft, spring rains and gentle breezes to bring the spring flowers, no beautiful colors when the sun sets behind a mass of clouds? When the sun's rays are directly on the moon, everything receiving those rays is boiling hot, but when the sun is busy elsewhere, down tumbles the temperature, far below the freezing point.
       When man first began to study the moon, it was thought that the darker areas were the waters of great seas, so they were named for seas known at that time. For, said some, the moon is just a big mirror reflecting what we have on the earth. Then came the building of observatories in which to place powerful telescopes with their massive mirrors, and spectroscopes with which to study the light that came to the earth from the moon. Soon it was proven that the moon was only a dead planet. And the Man-in-the-Moon, the Old-Woman-with-the-Book, and the Jumping-Hare of the Chinese were just plains with surrounding mountain rims and depressions.
       Of late years, much scientific information about the moon has been gained. Science has proved that the moon has an effect upon the tides of the ocean. We know now that its weight or mass is only 1/18 of that of the earth; therefore, the pull of gravity on its surface is very much less than that on the earth and your weight would be much less, if you were on the moon, than it is on the earth. On the earth the fall of a body is 16 feet per second; on the moon only 2.6 feet in the same length of time. Could one visit the moon, carrying an air bag so that he could breathe, his strides would equal those of a giant!
       Thus we see that the Man-in-the-Moon lives on a queer planet, on the side that is always turned towards us, and that he really consists of a mass of surface features in a land that is waterless, airless, and lifeless.  Cornell. 

New Views of the Moon from NASA.