Moon - No Conservation Status
I took this photo from the top of Haleakala in Maui
I took this photo of the Moon while on top of a dormant volcano in a national park in Hawaii before sunrise on my wife's birthday on our honeymoon. (That's a lot of prepositions!) I believe this is the first Wild Boyz Photography photo with no earthly subjects in the photo. You could say this photo is "out of this world". Enough about me, let's learn about the Moon!
The Moon is thought to have been created when a Mars-sized planet crashed into the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The debris from that collision later formed into what we now simply refer to as the Moon. Note that I am capitalizing the word "moon" in this article. This is because when we are referring to the moon that circles the Earth, there is no other name that distinguishes it. Humans did not identify another moon until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. We now know that there are over 190 moons orbiting the planets in our solar system!
If you want to get a good sense of how big the Moon is relative to the Earth, place a green pea next to a U.S. nickel. The radius of the Moon is about 1,080 miles. As you can see in this photo, there are many craters on the Moon. These are made from impacts!
Did you know that there is actually water on the Moon? In the permanently shadowed regions of the Moon there are actually high concentrations of ice water. When micrometeoroids hit the Moon's surface small amounts of water are released from the Moon.
Did you know that the Moon has a core, a mantle, and a crust?! The inner core is solid and made mostly of iron. It has a liquid iron shell that is about 56 miles thick. The core is complete by a partially molten layer. The mantle is made up of minerals such as olivine and pyroxene. The crust varies in depth from 43 miles to 93 miles depending on the hemisphere.
Learn more about the moon on the NASA website!
The Moon has a core, mantle, and crust!
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