Abstract
Before we begin to observe the physical wanderings of the “Queen of Night,” I want to introduce you to the mechanics of the Earth–Moon system. I will cover the relationships between the Earth, Moon, and Sun, the effects that gravity has on the motions of these bodies, and how we use their motions to mark time. In the next chapter, I will deal with the physical Moon, its geologic history, and the nomenclature used to name its features. Chapter 6 will present how we observe the Moon’s motions and general tips on viewing the Moon itself.
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Notes
- 1.
When using the term “one billion” throughout this book, this number is written as: 1,000,000,000.
- 2.
Osmond Fisher, Physics of the Earth’s Crust (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1881), 338.
- 3.
Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951), 23.
- 4.
Ibid., 23.
- 5.
Harlow Shapley, “On Facts and Fancies in Cosmogony,” Sigma XI Quarterly 21 (1) (March 1933), 1, 2.
- 6.
Reginald Aldworth Daly, “Origin of the Moon and its Topography.” Proc. of the American Philosophical Society 90 (2) (May 1946), 104– 119.
- 7.
Velikovsky, 244. Ares is the Greek name for the war god Mars.
- 8.
Carsten Münker, et. al., “92Nb–92Zr and the Early Differentiation History of Planetary Bodies.” Science 289 (5484) (September 1, 2000), 1538–1452.
- 9.
Alex N. Halliday and Michael J. Drake, “Colliding Theories.” Science 283 (March 19, 1999), 1861–1863.
- 10.
All of the values given here are based on their values as of the year A.D. 2000.0. The inclinations are to the perpendicular of the ecliptic.
- 11.
Do not confuse the retardation of moonrise along your eastern horizon caused by the varying angle of the ecliptic during the year with the change of the varying position of moonrise caused by the Moon’s varying declination relative to the ecliptic during a month or year.
- 12.
George F. Chambers, A Handbook of Descriptive and Practical Astronomy (London; John Murray, 1861), 46.
- 13.
Refer to Chapter 6 for information on the Moons’ librations.
- 14.
In his article Traité de L’origine et de Progrès de L’Astronomie, overstated the equatorial inclination angle as 2.5 degrees when the actual value is about 1.5 degrees. The article was published in Recueil d’Observations Faites en Plusieurs Voyages par Ordre de SA Majesté pour Perfectionner l’Astronomie et la Geographie (Paris: de l’Imprimerie Royale, 1693), 34, 35.
- 15.
“no wykkid planete, saturne or Mars, or elles [otherwise] the tail of the dragoun, is in hows [house] of the assendent… .” in A Treatise on the Astrolabe: addressed to his son Lowys by Geoffrey Chaucer, A.D. 1391, edited by Walter W. Skeat (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1872), 18. The word “assendent” means the degree of the zodiac seen on the eastern horizon or the region 5 degrees above and 25 degrees below an object along the zodiac. Words in brackets are modern English translations from the Middle English of Chaucer’s time. In his time, the Moon was considered to be a planet.
- 16.
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, translated by C. H. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Loeb Classical Library, number 303, 1935), 37–41.
- 17.
George Biddell Airy, Mathematical Tracts on the Lunar and Planetary Theories (Cambridge: J. Smith, Printer to the University, 1831), 15. Airy was appointed to the position of Astronomer Royal in 1835.
- 18.
Charles Augustus Young. A Text-Book of General Astronomy for Colleges and Scientific Schools (Boston: Athenaeum Press, 1898), 269.
- 19.
Johannes Kepler published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion in 1609. His second law basically states that: a planet (including the Moon) travels in its orbit at speeds such that its radius-vector sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time. In other words, the Moon’s velocity changes with the varying distance of the Moon from the focus of its orbit–the center of the Earth’s mass.
- 20.
The anomalistic year is the interval of 365.25964 days between two successive passages of the Earth through the perihelion of its orbit.
- 21.
W. M. Feldman, Rabbinical Mathematics and Astronomy (New York, 1931),157, 158.
- 22.
George Airy, “Report on M. Hansen’s ‘Calcul détaillé d’une Inégalité Nouvelle à Longue Periode, qui existe dans la Longitude moyenne de la Lune’.” MNRAS 7 (15) (May 14, 1847), 275–282.
- 23.
Simon Newcomb, “On a Hitherto Unnoticed Apparent Inequality in the Longitude of the Moon”, MNRAS 34 (8) (June 9, 1876), 358–361.
- 24.
Hugh Godfray, An Elementary Treatise on the Lunar Theory, revised edition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1871), v.
- 25.
Refer to Aristotle’s work On the Heavens, Book II, chapters 10 and 11, paragraph 291b for his discovery on the spherical shape of the Moon. He deduced this from the Moon’s crescent shape as it waxes and wanes, and the crescent shape of the Sun during a solar eclipse. To Aristotle, all of the heavenly bodies were spherical, because things, which possess no ability to move on their own, are spherical and if one heavenly body was spherical, then all of them had to be.
- 26.
Henry Wilberforce Clarke, Longitude by Lunar Distance (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1885), 9
- 27.
Nick Kollerstrom and Bernard D. Yallop, “Flamsteed’s Lunar Data, 1692–95, Sent to Newton.” JHA 26 (1995), 237–246.
- 28.
E. Neison, Esq., “On a General Method of Treating the Lunar Theory” Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society, 44 (1877), 1. Some of Neison’s Lunar Theory and other papers were never published. Many of these manuscripts, along with his lunar observing notebook for 1872–74, and two photographs of him are on file in the library of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in Burlington House, London. His penmanship is about as small as the type in this footnote, yet it is incredibly neat with no erasures that I could detect when I reviewed them in July 2001.
- 29.
Ernest W. Brown, “On the Completion of the Solution of the Main Problem in the New Lunar Theory.” MNRAS 65 (2) (December 1904), 104, 105, 107.
- 30.
William Ferrel, “On the Effect of the Sun and Moon Upon the Rotatory Motion of the Earth.” The Astronomical Journal 3 (18) (December 8, 1853), 138–141.
- 31.
John Henry Lefroy, “On the Influence of the Moon on the Atmospheric Pressure, as Deduced from the Observations of the Barometer made at the Magnetic Observatory at St. Helena.” Abstract of the Papers Printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 4 (1837–1843), 395.
- 32.
Thomas H. Carpenter, Ronald L. Holle, and Jose J. Fernandez-Partagas, “Observed Relationships Between Lunar Tidal Cycles and Formation of Hurricanes and Tropical Storms” Monthly Weather Review 100 (6) (June 1972), 451–460.
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Garfinkle, R.A. (2020). The Earth–Moon System. In: Luna Cognita. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1664-1_2
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