Moon
Our nearest big space neighbour
The Moon travels around Earth and is our nearest big neighbour in space. It does not make its own light: it reflects sunlight. From Earth, we see different amounts of its sunny half. That is why it sometimes looks like a thin crescent, sometimes half a circle, and sometimes a bright full disc.
The Moon has mountains, plains, and many craters. There is almost no air, and no familiar rain or wind. Astronauts have walked there in special spacesuits and brought Moon rocks home. The Moon’s gravity helps make ocean tides. It keeps roughly the same side facing Earth as it travels.
Let’s build the Moon as a puzzle → Explore in the planetarium →In the planetarium you can spin this world and look at it from every side.
Sources and images
Celestial maps: Solar System Scope / INOVE · CC BY 4.0. Thumbnails were reduced and shaded. Artistic SVG maps were created for this project.