The Moon - Second to the Sun 

Except for the Sun, our Moon is the most brilliant visible thing in the sky, and has been a topic of discussion and myth for many thousands of years. Brighty visible to the naked eye, the Moon is our closest neighbor and revolves around us; even to the naked eye, it reveals shaded areas that, under further investigation with your Meade ETX 90/UHTC Spotting Scope telescope or 10 x 32 BN Trinovid Mid Size Leica Binoculars reveals craters, seas and mountain ranges, nearly as varied as the Earth's own surface.

The Moon has had the distinction of having been scrutinized more thoroughly than any other object in our sky. It has highlands and lightly cratered seas that making the irregular visible pattern. The formation of our Moon is one that is a bit singular in the history of our solar system. Other moons formed out of protoplanatary disks, much like the planets. Our Moon, on the other hand, is thought to have been created when an object that was about the size of Mars glanced off of the earth and shattered; the resulting debris would then join together and made the Moon that we see on a nightly basis.

When the Moon appears fully in the sky and is not obscured by its position, we can see the lunar maria, the lunar seas that once were believed to be full of water. Now we know that the moon is full of ancient solid lava known as basalt. The seas were formed when comets and asteroids hit the Moon's surface. These maria are found primarily on the side of the moon "facing" the earth, with far fewer {collisions|impacts| having occurred on the far side.

The atmosphere of the Moon is very thin and one of its main sources is outgassing, where gases like radon are formed from the radioactive decay of the minerals in the crust of the Moon's surface. The other source for the Moon's atmosphere is the bombardment of tiny meteorites and ions from the solar wind.

In recent years, a new discovery about the Moon is the fact it might contain packets of ice water. Due to comets and meteors hitting the moon nearly continuously, water has been brought to the Moon. But we thought the weak gravity and the sunlight would split it down to hydrogen and oxygen and spin it off into space. It was discovered, though, that there are craters on the moon that are in permanent shadow, and that the water that rests in these shadow could be quite stable for long periods of time. The presence of water on the Moon, a subject which has seen hot debate is still undecided at this time.

Aside from the Earth, the Moon is the heavenly body in our solar system that we know the most about, but in many ways, it is still a mystery to us. Only time will tell us more about our closest neighbor and our only satellite.

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"We shall move out there, not because we want to but because we have to. There is an immediate reason for going--the earth's surface may soon become uninhabitable because of nuclear war or some other catastrophe, and we want the human race to survive--but there is a deeper and more compelling reason for going. We are what our remote ancestors were--colonists, always on the march toward better environments, always evolving, always adapting, learning how to control the physical world to our advantage. It is inconceivable that we have here and now come to the end of our long march, reduced to clinging to what we have, with no prospect for improvement--no hope. Rather we must view our present situation, with all its very real problems, as merely an overnight campsite along the way." Edward Gilfillan, Migration to the Stars, 1975