FROM LUNAR SEAS TO LUNACY

I’m sure that much of this will be common knowledge to all of you wise old Astro-owls out there, but these tidbits and nuggets came as news to me.

I hope you enjoy sharing them.

The book I’m referring to is, of course, basically a moon miscellany, and contains much, much more of these kinds of things, but these were some of the ones I most enjoyed finding out about, and I thought that it would be most appropriate to put them in a list format.

"The Book of the Moon"
by Rick Stroud

Ten things I learned from reading “The Book of the Moon” by Rick Stroud and one thing I still had to check up on the facts about despite it seeming blindingly obvious:

1. The lunar ‘seas’, or Maria, are evidence of long ago volcanic activity and are mostly made up of lava. They are where the largest disturbances due to mass concentrations (or ‘mascons’) of high gravity occur on the moon’s surface. It is still unknown what causes the mascons, although they did affect some of the readings on the equipment aboard the Apollo missions, but it is suspected that it might be due to asteroid fragments buried deep beneath the lava or just by the lava itself, although not all the areas of volcanic activity contain them.

2. Biodynamic farming does sound a lot like witchcraft, with its references to sowing seeds at moonrise according to the appropriate zodiac sign of the plant you wish to grow (apples are seeds and thus fire signs, for example, and therefore should be planted when the moon is in Aries, Leo or Sagittarius in the Sidreal “of the stars” 27.3 day  cycle) and harvesting at moonset, and burying powdered quartz in a cowhorn for the summer to attract and magnify cosmic energy, but a lot of real scientists believe that there might be something in it.

3. ‘Mawu’ was the name of the most powerful goddess of the Fon people of Western Nigeria and Dahomey in Africa, which might very well explain some of the odder links that typing MAWH into a search engine might give you. She is associated with joy and fertility (both things that unfortunately are not cornerstones in the day-to-day life of Lesser Blogfordshire) and, ironically brings the night and the cool air, both of which are associated with wisdom and age. Hmmm, perhaps I need to change my name… Her twin brother is apparently Liza, the Sun God and an eclipse is what happens when he’s making love with his sister (and you thought EastEnders could go into some dodgy areas, relationship-wise…).

4. The Metonic cycle measures the time it takes for the moon to reappear in exactly the same spot in the sky. This takes apparently 6940 days, or about 19 years and is named after Meton, a Greek philosopher although the Babylonians had also known this centuries earlier. The nearest point that the moon gets to the earth (the perigee), is 221,468 miles, and the furthest away it gets (the apogee) is 252,716 miles.

5. Despite worshipping both Sun Gods and Moon Gods, the Ancient Egyptians were not actually great astronomers. It interests me that, because, despite this, the relationship of the pyramids to position of the sun and the stars has fascinated certain people for many, many years.

6. The Soviet mission Luna 1 was the first man-made object to ever achieve escape velocity from the planet earth, but it missed the moon by 40,000 miles and went into solar orbit, technically becoming the first artificial planet, as well as having been the first artificial comet when it released a cloud of sodium gas nearly three quarters of a million miles into its flight. It still orbits the sun every 443 days and has been renamed Mechta, which is a Russian word meaning ‘dreamer’.

7. Luna 15 was launched three days before Apollo 11 and the mission happened simultaneously with the much more famous first landing of men on the moon. Eleven hours after Neil Armstrong made that historic “giant leap for mankind”, Luna 15 crashed into the Sea of Crises, thankfully nowhere near the first Apollo landing site in both space or time.

8. The Soviet space programme successfully retrieved moon-rock and returned it to the earth using a remote controlled lander during the mission designated Luna 16. Interestingly, a later mission, Luna 20, which drilled into an area in the lunar highlands, retrieved a one ounce sample which contained rock that was over three billion years old as well as a high proportion of both Aluminium and Calcium oxides.

9. The Russians developed the first (remote controlled) lunar rover, Lunokhod 1, which landed on the moon within Luna 17 on November 17th 1970 and operated relatively successfully for eleven months. The equipment was housed inside the body of the machine and the chamber containing it was heated by the radioactive decay of Polonium-210. Luna 21’s Lunokhod 2 rover also functioned well, thanks in no small part (and at the height of the cold war remember) to some high-resolution pictures supplied unofficially by NASA which helped to solve some early navigational problems.

10. The word ‘Zodiac’ is actually Greek and literally means ‘circus of animals’ which I suppose makes sense if you think about it, but I’d never really thought about it before, and maybe neither had whoever dubbed that murderer ‘The Zodiac Killer’ as ‘The Circus of Animals Killer’ really does not have quite the same ring to it, does it?

The thing that I felt that I’d better check was this: Does the moon look different from other points on the globe? Well, of course, it’s obvious. Yes, it does… but it took me a surprisingly long time to check this out and to be absolutely sure.

The view from Southern Hemisphere is opposite to the one I’m used to seeing in the night skies over England and is in fact upside down in relation to it, and the transition from crescent to crescent goes in the other direction. Yes, it was kind of obvious, but I still had to be certain. I thought I’d check up on the fact, despite how much sense it made to me in theory, because it’s quite easy to appear to be very ignorant about such things and it was interesting that at about a day after I’d been thinking about this, some shots taken of the moon over the desert in a documentary I was watching showed the waxing moon with the shadow at the bottom which rather proved it. If I’d not been thinking about this, I might not even have noticed.

I think that it must be very strange to get used to things being one way and then find yourself on the other side of the world where you don’t even recognise what the moon is doing. Once upon a long ago, when I was far away and missing my home dreadfully, I used to look up at the moon and think that the same moon was also looking down on those I was missing and I found that to be a great comfort. It is of course the same moon, but it’s not necessarily visible at the same time (or indeed the same way up) but it reflects its light upon us all just the same.

Of course, it’s always nice to know that it’s not just me who can be a little confused over what can seem blindingly obvious to everybody else. When I was on holiday last year, I used to sleep very badly and so I would head up onto the top deck of the boat to photograph the dawn. Occasionally, some of my fellow travellers would also be up there doing much the same thing. Among them were quite a few people who had been high-flyers in the worlds of industry and commerce and had many more achievements under their belts than I’m ever likely to.

However, I was slightly thrown by the chap who really didn’t seem to like my answer when he asked me which direction the sun was going to rise from. I pointed at the crescent moon and told him that if you think of the arc of the crescent as being like an arrowhead, then it must be pointing to where the sun is. I thought that it was obvious, but he drifted away to the far side of the boat, saying that he thought that couldn’t be right. It had risen on the other side of the boat yesterday…

The boat had, of course sailed since then, and was in a completely different place anyway, but the logic of that didn’t seem to strike him at all. I paused for a moment, slightly perplexed by this, and started to question my own logic as to where the light source providing the light which was striking the moon would be. Still, not long afterwards, the sun came up, just where I thought it should, and the day progressed as it should, and I was left to ponder upon matters of certainty and having the courage of my convictions.

How is it that, even when I know that I’m actually right about something, rare though these moments might be, I still need to apologise for it…? It would be appropriate at this particular juncture to refer this as lunacy. Is it really so much part of our modern culture that we don’t like to be thought of as being in any way ‘clever’ just in case someone thinks that you think that you are in some way ‘better’ than they are…? Sometimes, surely, if you just know something it’s just because you happen to, and it’s nice to share that with someone else and spread that knowledge around a bit… Hence my little list today.

Spread the word. The more we know about things, the better we all are for it.