Your lunar travel guide
I love the Moon. There’s nothing like it in the sky. It’s totally alien and yet completely accessible. No spacecraft needed. No squinting through a telescope to eke out a dim feature. No going online to look at the latest flyby photos. Just look up! It’s big, bright, and there to enjoy and inspire in so many ways — moonlit walks, moonrises, eye-popping pairings with bright stars and planets, and in wondrous detail through a telescope. No other body offers such easy access to the cosmos better than the one closest to home. Even for the casual observer the Moon is beautiful and approachable. I can’t count the number of times someone has come to up me, cellphone in hand, excited to share their latest photos of the moonrise.
Sitting 384,400 km away on average, the Moon is the closest planetary body to the Earth. Proximity gives it a brilliance greater than any other object in the sky except the Sun or a rare fireball meteor. But that brightness is all a ruse. The lunar surface reflects just 12% of the light it receives from the Sun, meaning that it’s as dark as a charcoal briquette. I once held a vial of Moon dust collected by the Apollo 17 astronauts, and I could hardly distinguish it from photocopy toner.
Scientist think the Moon formed from the shards of a collision between Earth and a Mars-size asteroid some 4.5 billion years ago, soon after Earth itself took shape. The fragments regathered and forged our only natural satellite, a happenstance body made of recycled worlds that redirects sunlight to soften the darkness and inspires us to great deeds. Its accidental birth led to it becoming humanity’s first cosmic outpost during the Apollo missions.
Follow the Moon around for a month, and you’ll get a sense of its orbital motion and how its changing position in relation to the Sun results in the familiar phases. The Moon takes 27.3 days — a sidereal month — to orbit 360° around. The two periods differ because Earth is always on the move as well, orbiting the Sun. During a sidereal month, Earth covers about 30° of its orbit. For the Moon to align again with the Sun and Earth at full Moon, it must travel another 2.2 days (around 30°) to compensate for Earth’s revolution.
