Moon: Encyclopedia II - Moon - Human understanding of the Moon

Moon - Human understanding of the Moon

Moon - Myth and folk culture

Moon - The Moon as muse

The Moon has been the subject of many works of art and literature and the inspiration for countless others.

Moon - Astrology

Moon - Scientific understanding

A 5,000 year old rock carving at Knowth, Ireland may represent the Moon, which would be the earliest depiction discovered.

In many prehistoric and ancient cultures, the Moon was thought to be a deity or other supernatural phenomenon. Among the first in the Western world to offer a scientific explanation for the Moon was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, who reasoned that the Sun and Moon were both giant spherical rocks, and that the latter reflected the light of the former. His atheistic view of the heavens was one cause for his imprisonment and eventual exile.

By the Middle Ages, before the invention of the telescope, more and more people began to recognize the Moon as a sphere, though they believed that it was "perfectly smooth".

In 1609, Galileo Galilei drew one of the first telescopic drawings of the Moon in his book Sidereus Nuncius and noted that it was not smooth but had craters. Later in the 17th century, Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi drew a map of the Moon and gave many craters the names they still have today.

On maps, the dark parts of the Moon's surface were called maria (singular mare) or "seas", and the light parts were called terrae or continents. The possibility that the Moon could contain vegetation and be inhabited by "selenites" was seriously considered by some major astronomers even into the first decades of the 19th century.

In 1835, the Great Moon Hoax fooled some people into thinking that there were exotic animals living on the Moon. Almost at the same time however (during 1834–1836), Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler were publishing their four-volume Mappa Selenographica and the book Der Mond in 1837, which firmly established the conclusion that the Moon has no bodies of water nor any appreciable atmosphere.

There remained some controversy over whether features on the Moon could undergo changes. Some observers claimed that some small craters had appeared or disappeared, but in the 20th century it was determined that these claims were illusory, due to observing under different lighting conditions or due to the inadequacy of earlier drawings. It is however known that the phenomenon of outgassing occasionally occurs.

During the Nazi era in Germany, the Welteislehre theory, which claimed the Moon was made of solid ice, was promoted by Nazi leaders.

The far side of the Moon remained completely unknown until the Luna 3 probe was launched in 1959, and was extensively mapped by the Lunar Orbiter program in the 1960s.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, NASA aerodynamicist Dean Chapman and others advanced the "lunar origin" theory of tektites. Chapman used complex orbital computer models and extensive wind tunnel tests to support the theory that the so-called Australasian tektites originated from the Rosse ejecta ray of the large crater Tycho on the Moon's nearside. Until the Rosse ray is sampled, a lunar origin for these tektites cannot be ruled out.

In 1997 the asteroid 3753 Cruithne was found to have an unusual Earth-associated orbit, and has been dubbed by some to be a second "moon" of Earth. It is not considered a moon by astronomers, however, and its orbit is not stable in the long term.

Moon - Meteor impact on the Moon

An impact event was observed by NASA scientist Rob Suggs and astronomer Bill Cooke while testing out a new 10-in telescope and video camera they had assembled to monitor the moon for meteor strikes [11]. After consulting star charts they concluded that the impact body was probably part of the Taurid meteor shower. This may well be the first recording of this type of lunar event which some have claimed to have witnessed in the past. See [12].

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Human understanding of the Moon", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki