Photo Essay: The Moon, La Lune, La Luna

Photos & Artwork Carolyn McCoy©

According to scientific belief, the celestial object we call the moon was, quite possible, created approximately 4.5 billion years ago. But, as scientific ideas often begin with guesswork and intuition, with small clues pointing the way to another idea, we can only hypothesize at the true origin of our beloved satellite. No one will ever fully know how things went down that long ago, but some ideas include its creation from a rogue or displaced planet caught in Earth’s orbit, or quite possibly it was formed with debris from Earth itself after a massive impact from a meteor or comet. Gravitational and magnetic forces that create the magic of physics may have bound the debris together, slowly forming a sphere that has tagged along with Earth on its yearly circumambulations around the sun for eons.

With blooming technology, it was inevitable that humanity would find a way to get to the moon. That historic visit with the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969 culled a scientific treasure chest of new and massively important information that has helped us bash many an absurd myth about what the moon was. We discovered no spacemen were living there; we found the moon was not made of cheese, and we were enlightened to find that it was not a large cardboard cutout made by a stage crew and hung in the air in a sound studio in LA.

We have discovered much about the moon since those first non-terestrial steps. As we now know, it is in synchronous rotation with Earth, taking 27 days, 7 hours, and 43.1 minutes to make a revolution around our Big Blue Marble flying at 1.02 kilometers per second. Because of the lack of its own rotation, we always see the same face of the moon, with its dark volcanic landscape interspersed with the brighter ancient crustal highlands and the prominent circular impact craters from meteors of days past. We have also discovered glass beads strewn all over the surface, indicating a past nova of our beloved sun. The moon has “moon quakes”, it has water molecules, and it shows that without an atmosphere, it’s fair game for every type of flying space rock to pummel its surface.

The moon is a powerful force. Without it following our planet we would have a very different world. Lunar power drives our oceanic tides as well as the blood-tides that flow through our veins, as we are water-formed beings. It guides the monthly cycles of fertility with women, hence creating new life.

The mystery of the moon guides our psyches to be wild, making us into lunatics or creating visions and dreams that leave us wakeful and restless. The waxing and waning of the lunar light each month has illuminated our path as a species for millions of years, whether we were aware of it or not.
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In any case, the moon sure makes for a pretty sight in the night sky, with the sun illuminating its surface so that the moon is bright and vibrant throughout most of the month. In a poetic sense, it’s as if the sun itself was like a lover to the moon, giving her an afterglow when they meet face to face. Her blush is what shines down upon us when she meets with the one who gives her light.