Since there is no air on the Moon, in order to see one another the Sun would have to shine directly on us, and if by any chance we should get into a shadow we would be as completely lost to view as if we had fallen into one of the craters, for a shadow on the Moon is as deep and black as the darkest night you ever saw on Earth. Shadows as we know them on the Earth are always softened, for the air scatters the light.
Nor would it do us any good to cry out or whistle, for, since sound waves are carried by the air, and since there is no air on the Moon, all our efforts to make ourselves heard would be useless, even if we were only a few feet from each other. The Moon is just as silent and cold and still as it looks, for, though it serves the Earth well as a mirror to reflect the Sun’s light, it is, after all, only a great, burned-out cinder.
Looking at the sky at night from the Moon, we are surprised to find how much bigger and brighter the stars seem, and how many more of them can be seen, than from the Earth. Here we see as many with the naked eye as we could see from the Earth with a three-inch telescope.
The Earth itself is seen like a mighty Moon—a Moon as bright as 40 of the Moons we are calling on, and so large is it that we can see, not only the continents and oceans, but the polar ice caps and the plains and the mountains as well, as we see objects of same size on Moon, as shown in [Fig. 117].
Fig. 117.—View of the Earth from the Moon.
Watching the Earth from this new viewpoint, we see it turn on its axis every 24 hours and going through all the phases—crescent, quarter, gibbous and full, and back to crescent again, just as the Moon does when we see it from the Earth.
More curious than the Earth is the view we get of the Sun from the Moon, the lack of air making the seeing so good that the spots on the Sun, the fiery prominences and the thin corona can all be easily seen with the naked eye.
When the Moon is new the whole half of the Earth that is turned toward the Moon is sunlit and by its reflected light we can easily read our time-card—for we must get back to Earth again and either write a book or lecture about the wonders we have seen.
The Moon and the Weather.—We have seen in [Chapter III] that our weather is entirely dependent on the Sun. Still it is believed by many persons today that the Moon has also something to do with the changes in the weather, just as it is the cause of the tides.