BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Luna - Earth's Daughter *new*

The Moon has always been our celestial companion, lighting the night, its changes serving as a calendar. What is it, where did it come from, why do we only see one side of it, what is our future together?

Luna - Earth's Daughter

Here's a comparison between the near side and the far side of the Moon. The dark areas are the basaltic lava plains. They cover about a third of the side of the Moon we see, and make a vision of "the Man in the Moon" - though other people see a rabbit or something else.

Everybody had known for a long time that the Moon was bone dry. In the nineties probes found some evidence of water. After a big announcement of water on the Moon, it went back again to being described as dry. What's the story in the 21st century?

Water on the Moon

The images show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as viewed by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. The left image shows brightness at shorter infrared wavelengths. On the right, in blue, is the distribution of water-rich minerals around a small crater. Both water- and hydroxyl-rich materials were found to be associated with material ejected from the crater.

Image Credits: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown Univ.

Total solar eclipse: the Sun a black circle framed by an ethereal corona. Dark enough to see stars, and for birds to go to sleep - yet an eerie darkness unlike night. The Sun can also be eclipsed on other Solar System planets as long as they have moons. But what would we see from our own Moon?

Are There Solar Eclipses on the Moon