The nearest sky object to us is - it shall be pointed out - our Earth. Our planet stays literally ‘in the sky too’, but of course, since we only see sun and moon and stars over our heads, we prefer to think that sky is above us. But, sky’s all around us, we’re part of it. For a planet far, far away from the ‘notre’, in which life could have developed intelligence and the latter, telescopes, we, our planet, would appear them as a part of their sky.
The second place in proximity to us goes, of course, to the moon. The earth moon distance is 384000 kilometers (speed of light: 300000 km/s). That means that light takes some more than a second to travel from Earth to our natural satelite, and that the silver moon light which we see some nights during full moons has left some more than a second ago the white satelite’s surface to reach our eyes their charm. The moon has always attracted the attention of our different civilizations; humans from all centuries, everywhere, since the first time we thought, have stared at it and wondered what it was, how would it look like nearer.
Every ancient civilization has got a moon calendar and has used it to manage their society and productive activities. The phases of the moon once upon the time determined the cicles of the agriculture (and, so far its know, they still do today!); each moon phase has been understood as a way in which the god (or goddess) ‘Luna’, ‘Moon’, have told us how to rule some of our behaviors during the different moments of the year, year after year. Now, when we know what our moon is, we still wonder, why it is what it is...
