When The Moon Hits Your Eye...

Published at Space.com

Looking up into the night sky, one of the first objects one is drawn to is the Moon. Man has been looking upwards at it for millennia. It has shaped our culture by giving us months, based on a lunar cycle. It exerts a strong gravitational pull on the Earth, giving us tides. People of old would look upon it's face and tell stories about it. (When I was younger, I heard an Native American legend of a child hiding in the Moon.) We have even put men on it, for a time. How many of us today, however, look up and really examine it? Whether you are just beginning to learn astronomy or are getting back to basics, this is an excellent place to start to learn the night sky. I have been helping my wife learn about the night sky since we bought a new telescope. The first object we looked at was the Moon. This is what I have sought to show her about our closet neighbor.

To best study the Moon, you should first learn a quick thing or two about the lunar cycles. When I wish to remember the different phases, I think of the acronym "DOC". Look at the letters, and you can see the shape of the moon at each phase. "D" is the first quarter. "O" is the full Moon. As you've probably figured, "C" is the third quarter. The last quarter, the new Moon, wouldn't correspond to any letter. It is not easy to see in this phase, as there is no light from the Sun reflecting off it. What little you see is from the light reflecting off the Earth itself.