Predicting Weather By The Moon - Xavier University Libraries

Formation of the Moon
tennis ball.
Space is called ‘space’ because there’s so much
space there. Hold a peppercorn between your index finger
and thumb. Imagine it is the Earth. The moon would be a
pinhead an inch away. What is the proportional distance to
Alpha Centauri, our nearest star neighbour? From New Zealand
you would have to catch a plane to Singapore and stand
in that city holding another peppercorn.. Astronauts who
flew to the Moon were struck by how the Earth and Moon
seemed tiny specks in an infinite, empty void. So large are
the emptinesses that separate celestial bodies, that most
illustrations exaggerate the size of the objects to avoid rendering
them as invisible dots.
On this scale, all human spaceflight with the exception
of the Apollo lunar missions has been confined to a
region of two pixels surrounding the Earth. Seeing the
Moon’s orbit in its true scale brings home how extraordinary
an undertaking the Apollo project was. Of all the human
beings who have lived on Earth since the origin of our
species, only 24 have ventured outside that thin shell surrounding
our Home Planet. Even the orbit which
geosynchronous communications satellites occupy is only
a little more than a tenth of the way to the Moon.
The Earth is a planet, revolving around the Sun once in
a year, and the Moon is a satellite, revolving around the
Earth at around 2,300 mph in just less than a month. If you
were on the Moon you would have days and nights, but each
day and each night would be two weeks long.
The Moon moves rapidly with respect to the back-
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