total solar eclipses, in which the Moon 

 just manages to cover the Sun's bright 

 disk, turning day into night and yield- 

 ing a rare view of the dim but majes- 

 tic solar corona. 



Before you start thinking that Earth's 

 sky was preordained to look beautiful 

 only for people, consider that T. rex and 

 friends, too, saw beautiful eclipses. So 

 will our successors in the tree of lite 

 hundreds of millions of years from now. 

 Only after a billion or so years will the 

 Moon have drifted far enough away to 

 look smaller than the Sun at all times, 

 thus ending a glorious era of eclipse 

 watching. 



We can all thank the space race, by 

 the way, for evidence that the distance 

 between Earth and the Moon is chang- 

 ing. In 1969 astronauts Neil and Buzz 

 placed the first array of "corner reflec- 

 tors" on the lunar surface. The array, 

 which looks a little like an open waffle 

 iron, is made up of a hundred small 

 quartz cubes cut in half at a forty-five- 

 degree angle and secured to an alu- 



minum panel. Any beam of light that 

 hits that configuration, regardless of the 

 incoming angle, gets triply reflected 

 within the half-cube and returns 

 whence it came, exactly parallel to the 

 original beam. Nothing magical here, 

 just the ordinary rules of geometry. 

 Hurl a bouncy ball into the corner of 

 a room, and the same thing happens; 

 apart from the curving effect of gravi- 

 ty, the return path of the ball is parallel 

 to its original path. 



Now aim a laser from Earth to the 

 Moon's corner reflector, and the beam 

 bounces right back to you. Time the 

 round trip, multiply that by the pre- 

 cisely known speed of light, and, be- 

 hold, you've got the precise distance 

 from Earth to the Moon. 



Within a few years after the first 

 reflector was laid down, three more 

 followed — two courtesy of the United 

 States and one, the Soviet Union. 

 More than three decades' worth of 

 measurements have now shown that 

 the Moon is moving away from Earth 



at the aforementioned rate of one and 

 a half inches a year. Clearly, tidal forces 

 are still busy working. 



No matter the details of its orbital 

 plight, the Moon remains an al- 

 luring object in both the daytime and 

 the nighttime skies. At dusk or dawn 

 when the crescent Moon gleams, you 

 can often see the rest of the lunar orb as 

 a kind of ghost, even though no sun- 

 light is hitting it directly. That phe- 

 nomenon is officially called earthshine 

 (though I have always preferred "moon- 

 shine"), and Leonardo da Vinci, early 

 in the sixteenth century, was the first to 

 figure out its cause. Unlike his con- 

 temporaries, who thought the Moon 

 was endowed with its own luminosity, 

 Leonardo understood that earthshine is 

 evidence that the Moon reflects the 

 light of Earth. 



Indeed, earthlight is far brighter 

 than moonlight. Averaged over both 

 light and dark areas, the barren lunar 

 surface reflects only 12 percent of the 



Where is this place, exactly? 



It's as far from Disneyland as you can possibly 



Maybe it's because our fabric freshener is just fresh air. prefer to make our own magic. To find out more about hanging 



Or because we feel free to hang out our laundry at our own out here, call 1-800-563-6353 and ask for Kelly. Or visit us at NEWFOUNDLAND 



discretion. Small victories, maybe. But in this kingdom, we www.NewfoundlandandLabradorTourism.com & LABRADOR 



Check out our neighbors at www.NewloundlandnndLabiadonourism.com/ncigbbors mk Canada 



