Top 5 Interesting Facts About Moon: Hello, Everyone Today I am going to share some interesting facts on The Top Five interesting facts about the Moon.The full moon occurs when the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun, so that its face is fully illuminated by the sun’s light. But any day of the month, the moon has some secrets up her sleeve. Here are The Top Five interesting facts about the moon.
Top 5 Interesting Facts About Moon
Table of Contents
1. There’s Actually Four Kinds of the Lunar Months
Our months correspond approximately to the length of the time it takes our natural satellite to go through a full cycle of the phases. From excavated tally sticks, researchers have deduced that the people from as early as the Paleolithic period counted days in relation to the moon’s phases. But there are actually the four different kinds of the lunar months. The durations listed here are the averages.
- Anomalistic – the length of the time it takes the moon to circle the Earth, measured from one perigee to the next: 27 days, 13 hours, 18 minutes and 37.4 seconds.
- Nodical – the length of the time it takes the moon to pass through one of its nodes and the return to it: 27 days, 5 hours, 5 minutes and 35.9 seconds.
- Sidereal – the length of the time it takes the moon to circle the Earth, using the stars as a reference point: 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes and 11.5 seconds.
- Synodical – the length of the time it takes the moon to circle the Earth, using the sun as the reference point 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2.7 seconds. It is the synodic month that is the basis of the many calendars today and it is used to divide the year.
2. We see Slightly More than Half of the Moon From Earth
The Most reference books will note that because the moon rotates only once during each revolution about the Earth, we never see more than half of its total surface. The truth, however, is that we actually get to see more of it over the course of its elliptical orbit: which is 59 percent (almost three-fifths).
The moon’s rate of the rotation is uniform but its rate of the revolution is not, so we are able to see just around the edge of each limb from time to time. Put another way, the two motions do not keep perfectly in the step, even though they come out together at the end of the month. We call this effect liberation of the longitude.So, the moon “rocks” in the east and in the west direction, allowing us to see farther around in the longitude at each edge than we otherwise could. The remaining 41 percent can never be seen from our vantage point; and if anyone were on that region of the moon, they would never see the Earth.
3. It would take Hundreds of Thousands of Moons to Equal the Brightness of the Sun
The full moon shines with a magnitude of the -12.7, but the sun is 14 magnitudes brighter, at -26.7. The ratio of the brightness of the sun versus the moon amounts to a difference of the 398,110 to 1. So that is how many full moons you would need to equal the brightness of the sun. because there is no other way that you could fit that many full moons in the sky. The sky is 360 degrees around in which including the half we cannot see, below the horizon, so there are over the 41,200 square degrees in the sky. The moon measures only a half degree across, which gives it an area of the only 0.2 square degrees. So, you could fill up the entire sky, including the half that lies below our feet, with the 206,264 full moons and still come up short by the 191,836 in the effort to match the brightness of the sun.
4. The First or Last Quarter Moon is Not one Half as Bright as a Full Moon
If the moon’s surface were like a perfectly smooth billiard ball, then its surface brightness would be the same all over. In such a case, it would indeed appear half as the bright.But the moon has a very rough topography. Especially near and along the day/night line that is known as the terminator, the lunar landscape appears riddled with the innumerable shadows cast by the mountains, boulders and even in the tiny grains of the lunar dust. Also, the moon’s face is splotched with the dark regions. The end of the result is that at first quarter, the moon appears only one eleventh as bright as when it is full. The moon is actually a little brighter at the first quarter than at the last quarter, since at that phase some parts of the moon reflect the sunlight better than others.
5. The Moon Encompasses a Huge Temperature Range
If you survey the Internet for the temperature data on the moon, then you are going to run into the quite a bit of confusion. There is a little consistency even within a given website in which the temperature scale is quoted in the: Celsius, Fahrenheit, even in Kelvin. We have opted to use the figures that are quoted by the NASA on its Website that the temperature at the lunar equator ranges from an extremely low minus 280 degrees F (minus 173 degrees C) at the night to a very high 260 degrees F (127 degrees C) in the daytime. In some deep craters near the moon’s poles, the temperature is somewhat always near minus 400 degrees F (minus 240 degrees C). During a lunar eclipse, as the moon moves into the Earth’s shadow, the surface of the temperature can plunge about 500 degrees F (300 degrees C) in less than the 90 minutes.
So, these are The Top Five Interesting Facts about the Moon. If any Queries or Questions is persist then please feel free to comment your view points.
