Gibbous AF

Here's some recycled material about the moon! You're welcome!

The moon has had a massive impact on every culture, so before we get into the science, let’s do a whistle-stop tour of what we used to believe about the moon on a spiritual  level.

The Aztecs called the moon Mictecacuiatl and believed it travelled through the night sky hunting for victims to consume… As did the Maoris in New Zealand, calling it the ‘man-eater’. The Tartars of Central Asia called it the Queen of Life and Death… All very ‘deathy’, isn’t it? Early Hindus believed the souls of the dead returned to the moon to await rebirth, and some European stories, not just rather turgid Christmas TV adverts for department stores, tell of a man in the moon - banished there, having been sentenced to death by god for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, because, you know the old saying - Sabbath and Sticks / Do not mix, ok I made that up. Most excitingly, though, everyone’s loony - yes - about rabbits. I had no idea. In Chinese mythology, the goddess Chang’e is stranded on the moon after overdoing the old immortality potion, and only has moon rabbits for company. I mean, how high could they jump? Aztec cultures revered the moon rabbit, some Hindus believe the moon is inhabited by a hare, and in Japanese and Korean folklore the Moon Rabbit is believed to be pounding the ingredients for a rice cake, which is presumably, er, rice. Moon rice. Anyway. SCIENCE: The moon’s cycles were well understood by… the Chaldea, a small Semitic nation living in a marsh in south-east Mesopotamia, and the Chinese astronomer Shi Shen had also worked out solar and lunar eclipses, roundabout the same time as Anaxagoras in Greece worked out that the sun and moon were giant spherical rocks, and that one reflected the light from the other. Archimedes designed an accurate planetarium, presumably with an adjoining Waxworks and grossly over-inflated ticket price. Ptolemy, around 120AD said that the moon was about 60 earth-radii away and that the moon’s diameter was 0.292 of that of earth, honestly, what a nincompoop! Look at the reality! 59, and 0.273! Tchoh!

Just to remind you - there weren’t any telescopes yet. And, to be honest, almost nothing happened for the next, nearly 20,000 lunar cycles… Until Galileo drew one of the first drawings of the moon from what he’d seen through a telescope. But, if you want to show off at a dinner party, he wasn’t the first. An Englishman called Thomas Harriot, who had bought a ‘Dutch Trunke’ (ie a telescope, invented the year before in 1608) drew a map of the moon several months earlier, on July 26th 1609. Not only that, he helped Sir Walter Raleigh figure out how to stack cannonballs on ships’ decks efficiently which made him think about atomism, and he’s credited with bringing potatoes to Britain. 

But Galileo worked out that the contours were caused by mountains and craters, from his experience as an artist using chiaroscuro, a theory which went against thousands of years of thought that the moon was perfectly smooth. 1837 was a landmark year. Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mådler published books which finally put to rest any fancy ideas people had espoused about vegetation existing on the moon, along with Selenites (moon-people, after the Greek goddess of the moon, Selene [pron: Seleeni]) And other myths have been debunked - apparently, no matter what Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and the emergency services say, we don’t all go a bit loony when there’s a full moon (although, well, I can only speak for myself). The first metaphorical rock we managed to chuck at it was Luna 2, a Russian spacecraft on 14th September 1959. It would be ten years and several missions later before Neil Armstrong walked on it and infamously said ‘Wow! I’m walking on the freaking moon, here!’ on July 21st, 1969, a mission that used less computational power than you get in one of those birthday cards that plays a tune. In 1967, an Outer Space Treaty had been ratified, ruling that everything in outer space, including the moon, could not be owned by any nation, and not used for anything other than peaceful means. Which is a relief as the American military were eyeing it up for a military base as early as the fifties. Whether we fight or not, on a full moon or not, Ted Nield in his book Supercontinent writes movingly that many, many millions of years from now, when every trace of us, even the radioactive signatures from our nuclear power and bombs has decayed to nothing, when the continents have shifted until our planet is no longer recognisable, our footprints on the moon could be the only thing left to prove we ever existed.