Bridge To The Moon: New Moon

(In which our new lunar explorer starts to experience all the Moon has to offer.)

Great-great-great-great-great-great-granddad: Although the Moon is very old, in a way it was very new to me - or I was new to it! At times I felt as if I was in some kind of funny, dark, grey, almost shiny junk yard, but without the junk, (most of the time), where I weighed practically nothing and could almost float: but if I jumped up I would always come down again - rather slowly! Sometimes I was exhilarated to think I was in space and on the Moon, and sometimes almost a little gloomy - I think because there wasn’t much colour on the Moon’s surface, and the sky was always black and almost always without visible stars! Fortunately, most buildings we went into must have been designed with this lack of Moon colour in mind, because I saw colour everywhere in most of them, and I found this rather cheering.

Great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter: Why was the sky without stars, Great-great-great-great-great-great-granddad?

Great-great-great-great-great-great-granddad: Because there was too much light from the sun, too much sunlight being reflected off the surface of the Moon, and too much sunlight being reflected off the Earth. In that respect, it was just like being on Earth during daylight hours when you can’t see the stars - except the sky is black on the Moon instead of blue, (because of the almost total lack of atmosphere). However, if you stood in a shadow of a building or a mountain or something, and looked at the sky, you could usually see a few stars. And at night, you see a lot more stars than you can see from Earth, particularly on the far side of the Moon where you can’t see the Earth, which therefore has no sunlight being reflected from the Earth.

What I really couldn’t get over on the Moon was looking up into the sky and seeing Earth - large, (compared to seeing the Moon from Earth), and blue and white in the big, black sky. It never looked the same twice - sometimes full, sometimes half, sometimes a crescent, and constantly showing different continents and islands and cloud formations - but it always looked like it was where I belonged, and was patiently looking forward to having me back! I looked forward to getting back up, (or down), to Earth - but not for a little while yet.

Somehow on the Moon I could feel lonely, embraced, blissful, sad, scared, courageous, loved, and bursting full of hope, all at the same time. I loved my time there so much I cried, (a number of times), but I was glad when I got back.

Great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, (who was perhaps too young to be greatly moved by old people’s heart-felt reminiscences, or perhaps just didn’t know what to say in response to them): What did you do on the Moon, Great-great-great-great-great-great-granddad?

Great-great-great-great-great-great-granddad: I went on a package tour of the Moon. A lot of the other people on the train I was on, were also going on the same package tour - in fact, the return train fare and the Moon tour were all part of a special deal. Not special in the sense that they rarely offered this deal, because they did it all the time. Special in the sense that you got a reduced train fare if you also purchased the Moon tour at the same time.

I’d already met some of the people going on the Moon tour, on the train, and I became quite good friends with some of them. A group of us would hang out with each other, every day on the Moon, and do just about everything together.

The tour took us to many of the 49 wonders of the Moon, including those on the so-called “dark side of the Moon”, which wasn’t dark at all, (except at night). You see, a day on the Moon lasts about two weeks, and a night on the Moon also lasts about two weeks, wherever you are on the Moon. So the “dark side of the Moon” is only in darkness for two weeks at a time, then in sunlight for two weeks - the same as the “light side of the Moon,” (not that anyone calls it that). After one lunar day and one lunar night, a lunar month of about 4 Earth weeks has passed.

The reason it’s called “the dark side of the Moon” is because it can’t be seen from Earth. The Moon is tidally locked into its Earth orbit, which means that it always shows the same side to the Earth. No one ever knew what the “dark side” looked like until spacecraft went around and took pictures of it in the 1960s.

Our Moon tour was planned so that it almost always took us to places that were in sunlight when we got to them, which meant we did a lot more travelling from north to south, or south to north, than from east to west, or west to east. We only really saw night once - and that was for only a short time. We also did a lot more travelling from east to west than from west to east, and when we’d finished the tour, we’d travelled completely around the Moon, heading west. We’d also taken one and a half Moon days, (or one and a half lunar months), to complete our tour. We first arrived on the Moon perhaps an hour after sunrise, and we left the Moon as it was getting close to sunset the next lunar day, but as we’d followed the day all around the Moon, we hadn’t properly experienced a lunar night. It seemed like it had been one six-week-long day, (except that the sky was always black).

I don’t know if you’re aware, but the whole Moon is on Greenwich Mean Time, (or, as the Moon people like to call it, Greenwich Moon Time). There are no time zones on the Moon, (well just the one - covering the whole Moon - I mean). Every point on the Moon always observes the same time as the time in London, Earth, (but without going forward an hour for months at a time for daylight savings). There’s no point in having different time zones when the daylight lasts about two weeks, and the night is about another two weeks long. The Moon people just observe a regular 24 Earth-hour day. They get up, go through the day, and go to bed and sleep, and do it all again in 24 hour cycles, all in continual daylight for about two Earth-weeks; then they get up, go through the day, and go to bed and sleep, and do it all again in 24 hour cycles, in continual night for about two Earth-weeks. So all the time we were on the Moon we were observing Greenwich Mean Time, (or Earth, London time).

On the Moon there are about four artificial weeks, based on Earth time - not that there’s any such thing as a natural week - in one lunar month; one lunar month in a lunar day; and about 12.4 lunar days in a year; and no seasons, because the Moon’s axis is nearly perpendicular to its orbit, and it doesn’t wobble enough to make any time of the year hotter or colder than any other!

On our first day on the Moon, (our first day according to the time of day in Earth, London, that is), we had free time. (Or, in other words, the tour didn’t start until the next day.) We, (that is, the group of friends I had made on the Moon train and I), settled into our hotel. Then we went outside to a park area of the hotel which had a flat, grassy area, and some sloped, grassy land, as well as a swimming pool, various courts for playing sport, and platforms people could jump off - either into the pool or into soft landing areas. We just spent hours walking, running, jumping; doing somersaults, cartwheels; playing leapfrog; throwing a frisbee; playing tennis, basketball; swimming; diving; riding bikes, scooters and skateboards and other things; and just generally mucking around in low Moon gravity; in a park; under an air-filled dome; under a jet black sky; in the sunshine; with the Earth about 384,000 kilometres above us.

We weren’t yet used to not being in Earth-days-and-nights, and it was something like midnight before any of us realised it wasn’t London daytime anymore, and we needed to get some sleep before getting on with the tour the next day. We had gone to eat in the hotel or at some nearby shops at various times before then, but I don’t think we’d observed regular mealtimes that day.

Next time:

Chapter Eight The Lunar Tour

(or read the whole story here: https://vocal.media/fiction/bridge-to-the-moon)