I have always been obsessed with the moon, much to the bemusement of some who seem to believe one must be simple-minded to love something that has always been, or always will be, there.  But this is why I love it.  It is why circles are so central to our concept of art and beauty.  Sure, the sun is also round, but you don’t see it as such as often as you see our closest neighbor.  And there is a great deal in nature that is approximately round, but perfectly so is rare.

Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock is even more obsessed with our only natural satellite than I am, and her book The Book of the Moon: A Guide to Our Closest Neighbor is the best work I have encountered on the subject.  Not only is it a concise and lively distillation of key and obscure information about the Moon, but it is also a very human and personal work.

Early on, we learn how her fascination started with her father, who would tell her of his long bike rides across the savannahs of Nigeria at night back when he was a child returning from a school miles away each day, the moon his only constant companion. 

As for Dr. Aderin-Pocock personally, she recalls being fascinated by the British stop-motion children’s show The Clangers, in which the odd, snout-nosed, mouse-like creatures of the title live below the surface of a “star” that is quite obviously a moon or planetoid, with trash can lids covering the crater-like openings.  I can identify with her preoccupation with this series, as I am also besotted with it, and I didn’t even discover it until middle age.

A great deal of scientific information is presented here, some of which I am still trying to wrap my gray matter around.  It helps that she keeps the tone light and even works in some humor.  I especially liked the passage about tidal locking, in which we learn all the major satellites in the solar system are in such an arrangement with their respective planets.  Pluto and Charon eternally present the same side to each other, in her words, “as they waltz around the solar system”, yet hilariously describes that as “creepy”.  But if you were to ask me about the particulars of this scientific principle, I’d still have to take a pass, even after having read this book.

Her history of our knowledge of our Moon has many intriguing nuggets of trivia.  I was not previously aware that, among Galileo’s many discoveries, he determined the lunar surface is not smooth.  Like some of his other beliefs, the Church felt challenged by this theory, as their position was God made only perfect celestial bodies, ones which were completely round and smooth. 

Then there was DaVinci’s insight that water on the moon must fall to the lunar surface in the same way it falls to the ground on Earth.  This is such an obvious point that my brain went, “Well, duhhh…”  Alas, one thing the man wasn’t right about is there isn’t a great deal of water on the moon.

And yet, there is potentially some there, as well as some unique chemicals we might discover in “cold traps” at the poles, where temperatures can be as low as -328°F. Some of those areas ight never see sunlight.  I was surprised by this factoid, as well as some other points, in a section about the Moon’s atmosphere, of which I previously thought there was none to be found. 

I was also quite surprised to learn the Moon’s gravity is uneven or, to use the author’s terminology, “lumpy”.  This is attributable to isolated, large concentrations of mass below the surface.  I know mass equals gravity, but I never really thought about it as a practical concern before this.  Basically, if we don’t take this into account, it will make any attempted landings a lot more dicey.

Since the history of the Moon is inextricably tied to that of the Earth, there also a great many interesting factoids about our world.  I was previously oblivious to the Miller-Urey experiments of the 1950’s, in which an electrical charge was ran through a combination of gasses believed to resemble the atmosphere of early Earth, resulting in the creation of a “brown slime.  It wasn’t too exciting to look at, but what they had created was no less than one of the building blocks of life.”  I also learned how the growth of coral Eusmilia fastigiata helped us determine an Earth year 400 million years ago was 400 days and each of those days was 21 hours and 54 minutes long.

Some others musings concern how we as humans have defined the Moon.  For example, its English name is believed to come from the Germanic “menon”, itself derived from an Indo-European word for month, that being “menses”.  Interesting how even the words to describe the Moon are associated with the menstrual cycle.  Then there’s the curious phrase “blue moon”, which is used for a month with two full moons.  It likely comes from an old word “belewe”, which means betrayal.  That seems odd, even after learning it is speculated this moniker came about because a year with thirteen full moons could not be trusted.  I doubt this was the origin of triskaidekaphobia, but who knows.  That some people associate full moons with scary and unusual activity seems to be a correlation.

One part of the book which greatly intrigued me concerns eclipses, as I saw my first (and, likely, my last) full one last year.  A question I have long pondered is answered here, and that is why we don’t have more of them.  Basically, it comes down to a five-degree difference between the planes of the Earth and Sun and that of the Earth and Moon.  Funny, but I understand this without fully understanding it.  To quote Gene Cernan, currently the last man to have set foot on the lunar surface, just before sealing the hatch of the capsule: “We leave as we came, and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”  I just hope it is truly with peace, and the best of intentions, that humans will one day return to the Moon. Or, better yet, please just leave it alone.