Women yet to step on moon but well intertwined with it in literature

International News

In the late 17th century, the female English playwright Aphra Behn wrote a smash hit play about a man obsessed with the moon, who was constantly travelling there in his imagination. Exactly 282 years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually made that dream a reality.
Their astonishing achievement on July 20, 1969 led some to worry that the moon would become an object of purely scientific study – a barren and lifeless body, no longer a source of romantic inspiration. Fortunately, this fear did not come to pass.
For example, in the year that marked the 40th anniversary of the landings ten years ago, the then poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy edited To the Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poems which gathered together works from ancient to modern, and included her own poem, The Woman in the Moon.
And while no woman has yet stepped on to this celestial body, women have long been associated with the moon – with its tidal pull, and the binary thinking that places it secondary in majesty to the sun. It is no wonder, then, that the moon has stimulated some incredible literature by female writers.
The moon is often envisaged as a female entity, which inspired poems on the theme of her gaze as she looks down on Earth benignly. Way back in antiquity, the Greek poet Sappho did just this in her short song describing how:
When, round and full, her silver face, Swims into sight, and lights all space.

 This trope continued for millennia and into the 19th century. Louisa May Alcott (author of Little Women) wrote The Mother Moon in 1856, imagining a benevolent maternal moon looking down on the Earth, occasionally hidden but ultimately undiminished by clouds...Read More

How big is moon and how far is it? Let's put facts into perspective

International News

Even though we can see the Moon shining brightly in the night sky – and sometimes in daylight – it’s hard to put into perspective just how large, and just how distant, our nearest neighbour actually is.
So just how big is the Moon?
The Moon passing in front of Earth, captured by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), more than a million kilometres away from our planet.
That answer isn’t quite as straightforward as you might think. Like Earth, the Moon isn’t a perfect sphere. Instead, it’s slightly squashed (what we call an oblate sphereoid). This means the Moon’s diameter from pole to pole is less than the diameter measured at the equator.
But the difference is small, just four kilometres. The equatorial diameter of the Moon is about 3,476km, while the polar diameter is 3,472km.
To see how big that is we need to compare it to something of a similar size, such as Australia.
From coast to coast
The distance from Perth to Brisbane, as the crow flies, is 3,606km. If you put Australia and the Moon side by side, they look to be roughly the same size.
The Moon vs Australia. NASA/Google Earth

 But that’s just one way of looking at things. Although the Moon is about as wide as Australia, it is actually much bigger when you think in terms of surface area. It turns out the surface of the Moon is much larger than that of Australia.The land area of Australia is some 7.69 million square kilometers...Read More

50th anniversary of Apollo 11: How we came to know a lot about the Moon

International News

The Moon has been a subject of fascination since time immemorial. It has always found a place among all kinds of stories through astrology, poetry, myths, religion et al. More than two and a half millennia before man set his foot on the Moon, he set his mind towards understanding it.
There are references in the works of ancient Babylonian, Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophers around 500 BCE. Throughout the next two thousand years, the Moon was studied by various astronomers. The big breakthrough, however, happened in 1609, when Galileo Galilei drew one of the first telescopic drawings of the Moon in his book Sidereus Nuncius and noted that it was not smooth but had mountains and craters. After Isaac Newton discovered gravitation, astronomy picked up speed. Over the next few centuries, science not only devised means of looking at faraway objects clearly, but also started dreaming of travelling to them one day.
Here's a brief timeline of the landmark moments of lunar exploration in modern times:
The Space war era
During the late 1950s at the height of the Cold War, the United States Army conducted a classified feasibility study that proposed the construction of a manned military outpost on the Moon called Project Horizon with the potential to conduct a wide range of missions from scientific research to nuclear Earth bombardment. The study included the possibility of conducting a lunar-based nuclear test.
1959: Soviet Union touches the Moon

 The Moon was first visited by the Soviet Union’s uncrewed Luna 1 and 2 in 1959..Read More