… there it was… a beautiful slender crescent that hung in the western night sky just after sunset.
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| Not my photo, but very similar to what I saw on Jan 1, 2017. P/C NASA |
I spent a bit of time in rapt contemplation, and then started wondering…
The US sent six missions to the moon (Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17). And I remember reading the location of each landing, and then looking at the moon to locate exactly where the landers were located. Once upon a time, I knew the major craters of the Moon very well–I knew their shapes and locations like the back of my hand.
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| Apollo 11 astronaut and foot pad of the lander. P/C NASA |
We all know that the Moon is a big sphere. But it didn’t occur to me until just now that the landings all just happened to be on a part of the Moon where I could see them? Was this just clever publicity and mission planning to make their landing spots visible to the public?
Once you get curious about something, it’s hard to stop. This line of thinking leads me to our Challenges for the beginning of 2017. Can you figure them out?
1. If you look at a map of the Apollo landing sites, they’re all visible from Earth–none are on the back side (that is, the side of the moon that faces away from the Earth). Why were all of the landing sites on THIS side? (You’d think the back side would have been more interesting. Why didn’t we go to the back side?)
2. Every so often I’d sketch out the moon as I saw it in the night sky. Once, when I was looking at several of my sketches together, I noticed that some of the craters on the Moon’s edge seemed to be in slightly different places. Huh? I know that the Moon always has the same face pointed to us, but when I looked at my sketches, it would seem that it’s not always exactly the same face–especially near the edge. Why would the Moon’s face be slightly different during different times of the lunar month? Is it always showing us exactly the same face at all times?
Both of these questions require a bit of thinking (rather than just search skills). You’ll need to do a bit of research and critical thinking to get to the answers.
Can you answer these Challenges about the Moon?
Search on, in the spirit of the Apollo missions!
