Let’s imagine that we are on the moon.
``What’s that? Can’t you hear me? I am yelling at the top of my lungs!’’
``What are you saying? I can not hear you’’.
`Oh, I forgot to turn on the telephone. There, now we can hear each other’’
You see, there’s no air on the moon. That’s why we brought our air masks and oxygen tanks n our trip. If we had not got them, we would not have been able breathe. And, since sound has to travel through air, on the moon there simply is no sound. It is a good thing we brought our telephones, otherwise it would not be possible to talk.
Oh, it is terribly hot, is not it? The sun is shining down on the moon. Without any air to absorb the sun’s rays, all the heat is beating right down on us. There is not even a breeze, for breeze is the air in motion. And there is no air at all ere.
When will the sun set there?
Oh, no, the sun won’t set in few hours. In fact, it won’t set for about 250 hors. It is not surprising!
Don’t you know that each day on the moon is a long as for weeks on our earth?
There are two weeks of daylight and two weeks of night.
During the two weeks of the moon’s daytime, the sun shines brilliantly without every stopping. There are never any clouds; there is never any fog, never any rain. There’s no water on the moon either, because water simply cannot exit on the surface of the moon. During the weeks of sunshine on the moon, it gets a whole lot hotter here than it ever does on the earth.
Here’s a great big rock. Let’s get into its shade. This is not cool- it’s cold! And it’s dark. When there is no air, the shade gets completely dark and terribly cold. On the earth the air gets warm and it helps to scatter the light into shady places. But on the moon, it is really dark in the shade and oh, so cold.
It’s too cold here in the shade. Let’s hop out into the sunlight. It’s not it queer how far and how high you can jump on the moon?
You could jump over a tree or a hose, if there were trees or houses on the moon. That’s because the moon is so much smaller than the earth that everything weighs only one-sixth as much as it does on the earth. A boy or a girl who weigh forty-five kilograms at home would weigh only 7 kilograms on the moon. If there were a circus on the moon, we we’d see the elephants jumping around as playfully as kittens.
Just look up at the sky. The sun is shining brilliantly and yet the whole sky s dark and filled with stars. It’s a queer feeling to see the brilliant sun in the background of dense darkness, with all those UN twinkling stars.
On the earth, when the sun is up, one of the stars can be seen. Even if the sun is behind the clouds in the daytime, the sky is still lit up. But on the moon, there are no clouds. The sky is always dark and the stars are always there.
And then look over-see the crescent earth? Ah, yes, that is the earth. It looks just the way the moon looks from the earth, only much bigger and brighter. The earth also changes shape when we look at it from the moon. So there are crescent earths and half earths and full earths.
His fantastic visit to the moon is over and let us imagine we are back o the earth.