We all grew up with stamps. Those small, delicate images which tell stories of countries and events and which can decorate an envelope quite wonderfully. Nowadays, letters are increasingly stamped with bar codes or rolling stamps. Still, the stamps are surviving and occasionally, the moon is to be seen on them. Mostly when a historic space travel event is being celebrated. [read more]
Quite a lot! The date of Easter is actually determined by the full moon. Quite contrary to Christmas, the Easter date is part of the changing holidays and defined as follows: »Easter is on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring.«
At first glance, this appears to be quite easy: one look at the calendar, beginning of spring is mostly on 21st March and then simply search for the next full moon and the weekend after will be Easter. [read more]
We have compared the amount of visitors from our full moon pages with the curve of an electrocardiogram (ECG) and came across an astonishing similarity. It almost appears as if the attention that we humans give to full moon would have its own heartbeat …
It is obvious that the interest in full moon can be linked to its rhythm. The average duration of a moon month is approx. 29.5 days, so a little bit more than four weeks and a little bit less than one calendar month. One can safely say, a lot of people are paying attention to the moon at full moon and clearly a lot less so during the other moon phases. [read more]
As is generally known, the Moon is not a disc but a sphere and one could ask the question if we actually get to see different sides of this Moon sphere? The answer is: no! At least this is true for the observer from Earth.
Indeed, we always see one half of the Moon. This is because the Moon is locked into the Earth rotation. This is called »synchronous rotation«. It means that we are never able to see the side of the Moon facing away from us. And until it was possible to photograph the reverse of the Moon with space probes, nobody knew what we would find or how it would look. [read more]
