When the Moon 

 Hits Your Eye 



More knowledge and better data 

 only deepen the beguiling appeal 

 of the best-known object in the night sky. 



By Neil deGrasse Tyson 



Countless cultures have spun 

 countless tales about Earth's 

 nearest neighbor in space. To 

 the ancient Greeks, the Moon was a 

 pale-faced young woman riding across 

 the sky in a horse-drawn chariot. To 

 the Aztecs, no strangers to blood and 

 gore, the Moon was the severed head 

 of a malicious daughter of the Earth 

 goddess, which her brother, the Sun 

 god, had flung into the sky. 



But colorful tales don't satisfy sci- 

 entists. We want data. So as soon as 

 word of the newly invented telescope 

 spread across Europe, astronomers be- 

 gan to acquire or construct their own 

 versions of this marvel and turn them 

 toward the Moon. Early in August of 

 1609 — a couple of months before 

 Galileo built his first telescope — the 

 English mathematician and astron- 

 omer Thomas Harriot made the first 

 known drawing of the lunar surface as 

 seen through the lens of an optical in- 

 strument. Half a year later, a month 

 before Galileo's first batch of tele- 

 scopic observations appeared in print, 

 Harriot's friend Sir William Lower, an 

 English country gentleman, wrote up 

 his own observations of the Moon in 

 a letter to Harriot: 



In the full she appears like a tarte that my 

 cooke made me last weeke; here a vaine of 

 bright stuffe, and there of darke, and so 

 confusedlie all over. I must confesse I can 

 see none of this without my cylinder. 



That's what happens when you look 

 at the sky while you're hungry. 



No surprise that the Moon was one 

 of the first celestial objects to be tele- 

 scopically described and tracked: It's 

 big. It's close. It's bright. No surprise ei- 

 ther that, nearly four centuries later, the 

 Moon became the first destination of 

 the U.S.-Soviet space race. As President 

 John F. Kennedy had hoped, Ameri- 

 cans — specifically the Apollo 1 1 astro- 

 nauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz 

 Aldrin — became the first people to set 

 foot on the Moon, on July 20, 1969. A 

 full decade earlier (not that Americans 

 think about it much), the Soviet Union 



David De Lossy, Full moon rising 



1 34 I NAT UK A I 1 1 1 s T c> jtV;. April 2.006 



i. 



