The moon is our nearest neighbor in space. It has flat places, high pointed mountains, and wide craters. There is no air on the moon.

There are no clouds, no wind, and no rain. So there is no water. There are no rivers, no oceans. You will see stars in the daytime, if you go the moon. They will be clear bright points of light, and sky will be dark. When we see the full moon rise in the sky, it glows with light. The moon looks like a shining silver ball, doesn’t it? But the moon has no light of its own.

Image by quinet via Flickr

Where does the shining light on the moon’s face come from? It is form the sun and is reflected from the face of the moon. Where there are mountains on the moon’s face, the light makes shadows. They always point away from the sun. Men of science, called scientists, look at pictures of the moon’s shadows ad measures them.

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These scientists can measures how high the mountains are by their shadows. When the mountains are very high, the shadows are long and shaped like ice cream cones. In these shadows the moon is colder than anything we know on the earth. The pictures also shadow big craters on the moon. Scientists think that one of the craters may be 140 miles wide! Shadows tell us about the craters. They show that there are rings of mountains around these big holes. There are also mountains in the centers of some craters. The moon show us many “faces’’ as it rides along in the sky. It may be a thin crescent of light shaped like a `C’. It may look big like the letter `D’. The crescent, the moon shaped like the letter `D’, and the full moon all reflect light from the sun. Shadows have all kinds of stories to tell. There are old stories about a moon-boy who lived on the moon. There are true stories which spacemen tell nowadays. There will be new stories that you can tell after you take a trip to see the shadows on the moon.  

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