Selene

I saw a fantastic photo of the moon the other day and it inspired me to try and take a photo of the moon. I’ve never been able to for lack of tripod or sufficient zoom on my camera but I probably have both now. Alas, I haven’t been able to see the moon when I’ve looked. I’ve seen it in the car but not when I get home, it’s been cloudy or the moon has already set past the horizon.

To try to capture the big cookie I installed KStars which maps the sky from any place on the earth at any time. You can search planets and constellations and satellites such as the moon. You can also retrieve information about these things, in the case of the moon, I could find between which times it will be in the sky from my location. It set sometime in the hour of 9 last night but is going down sometime after 11 tonight so I might capture it. Although we’re going out for a fancy dinner tonight so maybe we won’t get home in time.

Wikipedia had some interesting things to say about the moon:

• It’s the earth’s only natural satellite
• Sometimes it’s called Luna (Latin) or Selene (Greek)
• From the earth we see the same face of the moon nearly all the time (do to synchronous orbit)
• The other side is called the “far side” or “dark side”, dark because we don’t see it or know it, not because it doesn’t receive any light

The moon’s origin is a mystery as it seems implausible that the moon was created at the same time as the earth or that it later joined the earth’s orbit around the sun. Apparently the moon’s crust was formed 20-30 million years after the earth’s. One theory is that a large planet like object collided with the earth when it was semi-molten and some of this lava type substance ejected from the earth’s surface and collected in orbit around the earth.

From a Christian perspective I’m okay with this theory. It says that the moon was created after the earth… the Bible says God made them, it doesn’t say how except that he did it by speaking. How amazing his power and how creative his creation is. Of course the theory could be rubbish, all theories could be (they’re not proven or they’d be theorems right?), who can say unless they were there?

Wikipedia didn’t tell me whether the moon rises and sets at the same-ish place in our sky, like the sun goes from east to west-ish depending on the seasons. Hubby thinks that given the different phases of the moon it would be unlikely that it came up and the same place.