Moon Thoughts

The principle purpose of children is enforced humility. My 6-year-old asked why the moon is sometimes visible during the day, and I had no idea. I tried stalling him with the likeliest theory explaining the moon’s origin but he didn’t buy it, so I had to research the question.

The two-part answer is quite mundane. We can see the moon because of its relative brightness. The only brighter natural object is the sun. Sometimes even Venus, the third-brightest object, is visible during the day – a fact I have often confirmed, just as I have seen other stars in daylight, especially in the morning.

We can see the moon in daylight only during the portion of its 28-day cycle when it is closest to the sun. After the full moon, as it moves gradually eastward, it appears closer to the sun early in the morning. After the new moon, it moves away. In other words, clouds and pollution permitting, you can potentially see the moon in daylight for about two weeks each month.

On the way to figuring this out I happened upon much interesting moon lore, including the names of the full moons. I remember seeing my first strawberry moon, in June 1994 – an apocalyptic sight. But I also learned of The Moon, a “new” book by Henry David Thoreau. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., which had earlier published Thoreau’s journals, had leftover manuscript pages including a sheaf on notes and fragments Thoreau himself titled “The Moon.” In 1927, the Boston publisher printed 500 copies of a slender, pamphlet-like book they titled The Moon. I found a reprint edition from 1985 in my university’s lbrary.

In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Robert D. Richardson Jr.says the moon material dates from a series of night walks Thoreau took in the summer of 1851. Thoreau drew upon the material for a lecture he delivered in Plymouth, Mass., on Oct. 8, 1854. Walden had been published two months earlier, on Aug. 9. Scholars speculate that Thoreau may have contemplated the moon as the subject of his third book, after A Week and Walden. Richardson, after citing Chopin’s nocturnes, writes:

“Romanticism had favored the form, in music, verse, or prose. Thoreau’s quiet, cool moonlight sketches are prose nocturnes.”

I would agree, though much of The Moon lacks the rigor, wit and closely observed detail of Thoreau’s best prose. Some are “moony” in the sense of swooningly impressionistic. But there’s much to enjoy, like this:

“If my pages were written in a larger character, I would extinguish these lamps, and, standing by a window, read them by the light of the moon alone.”

And this:

“The light of Orion’s belt seems to show traces of the blue day through which it came to us; the sky is at least lighter on that side than in the west, even about the moon. Even by night the sky is blue and not black, for we see through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day. I see to the plains of the sun, where the sunbeams are reveling.”

On Friday, NASA announced it has awarded a contract for construction of a new lunar spacecraft. It’s name: Orion. And tonight, the European satellite,Smart-1 will land on the moon. It’s lunar destination: The Lake of Excellence.

And one more from Thoreau, a rhyming couplet displaying his inveterate love of paradox:

“In such a night let me abroad remain
Till morning breaks, and all’s confused again.”