Interesting Things About the Moon

~~When Neil Armstrong took that historical step of "one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind" it would not have occurred to anyone that the step he took in the dust of the moon was there to stay. It will be there for at least 10 million years.

~~The moon is the only extraterrestrial body that has ever been visited by humans. It is also the only body that has had samples taken from it.

~~On the moon, there is no wind or water.

~~Only 59% of the moon's surface is visible from earth.

~~From earth, we always see the same side of the moon; the other side is always hidden.

~~The moon is about 1/4 the size of the Earth.

~~The dark spots we see on the moon that create the image of the man in the moon are actually craters filled with basalt, which is a very dense material.

~~The surface area of the moon is 14,658,000 square miles or 9.4 billion acres.

~~The moon rotates at 10 miles per hour compared to the Earth's rotation of 1000 miles per hour.

~~We all know there was a man on the moon, but did you know that there is one who stayed there? Dr. Eugene Shoemaker, a Geological Surveyor, who educated the Apollo mission astronauts about craters, never made it into space himself, but it had always been one of his dreams. He was rejected as an astronaut because of medical reasons. After he died, his ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft on January 6, 1999, which was crashed into a crater on the moon on July 31, 1999. The mission was to discover if there was water on the moon at the time, but it also served to fulfill Dr. Shoemaker's last wish.

I took this photo of the moon in October, 2009.