Christopher Cokinos
The Moon is a familiar sight, but not a familiar world, at least to most of us. We see it rise between trees, over roofs, above a plain or crops. Many of us still worship it or incorporate its being into religious calendars. We paint it and write poems about it, after eons.
But what do we know of the Moon — as the Moon?
I’ve written about our companion world for years now, from articles supporting further exploration to lunar-research news in popular science magazines to the poem and prose I have contributed to the wonderful Moon Bound project. Last year I published a book–a human and natural history of the Moon–taking in the sweep of prehistoric lunar time-keeping to present-day plans for a human return. I even organized an all-artists lunar-surface simulated mission at the Space Analog for Moon and Mars at Biosphere 2. For six days, we worked as though in a lunar habitat. We even donned a pressure suit and, rigged to a counter-weight, experienced walking in 1/6 gravity-equivalent. (It wasn’t easy.)
I could not have done any of this without my telescope. I’ve had this hefty, 10-inch reflector for years. Cradled in a base like a lazy susan, this “Dobsonian” optical tube swings left to right, up and down, and soaks in photons like a sponge. I’ve been known to hug it after a good night of viewing.
And one night years ago when living in Tucson, Arizona, worn down by overwork and mid-life questions, staring at a city-lit sky, I brought the telescope out to look at the Moon. Though I grew up as a child obsessed with the Apollo missions, I’d never really explored the Moon through my telescope. Suddenly, it seemed like the only thing to do.
I’ve not looked back. Observing the Moon through any eyepiece reveals a sublime, wild landscape of mountains, craters, channels, volcanoes and vast seas of solidified lava. Knowing the Moon through the texts written by observers in centuries prior and by scientists working today allows me to imagine being there, standing on its surface like one of the Moonwalkers, becoming, as a favorite 19th century selenographer once put it, “a lunar being.” On cloudy nights or during the day, I’ll look at high-definition images of the Moon taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, seeing “almost-there” detail.
I seek connection to actual places. I eyeball the sublime 250,000 miles away.
Stand with me on the Moon. The horizon is much closer than on Earth, the Moon’s diameter fitting nicely on to a coast-to-coast map of the U.S. At just over 2,000 miles diameter, the horizon on the Moon is 1.5 miles away, about half that perceived distance on Earth. The Moon’s curve is palpable. With no atmosphere to speak of, the Moon does not scatter light in its sky. It’s either blindingly bright or darker than a cave. But it’s not just white and black and gray. Astronauts reported different colors depending on the height and angle of the Sun and whether they were looking toward it, away from it or across the light. They saw tans, they saw golden hues.
Of course you’re wearing a space suit. Airless, with temperatures ranging from, approximately, 250 degrees F to minus 250 degrees F, the Moon is inimical to life. In the suit, you move more stiffly than you do with bare skin or clothes. And, as I mentioned, Moonwalking isn’t easy. When I left our pressurized habitat for my “extra-vehicular activity,” I felt as though I wore an exoskeleton of air, the oxygen hissing by my ear like an insistent snake. Once hooked up to the gravity off-set, I leaned forward and learned to use the balls of my feet to walk-hop-half-swim forward, the heels to dig in and stop. I kept my arms out like bird’s wings. The gloves stiffened my fingers as though I were frozen, though my heart was pounding and sweat poured out of me.
Being on the Moon will be hard. We’ll want to avoid the glass-edge-sharp hazards of lunar dust (it smells like wet gunpowder), and we’ll be confronted with a dead landscape. Apart from human sounds, there will be no sound. Apart from human companions, there will be no other lives.
But if you have come to know the Moon there will be kinship: The place itself. The wave-like wrinkle ridges of Sinus Iridum. The impact-smoothed hulking high Apennines, shouldering into a sky full of stars and, at times, the improbable Earth, casting an eerie blue light. Crater walls both shallow and steep. Regolith like powder, churned by micrometeorites. Scarps and rilles. The yellow-tinged Aristarchus Plateau, the summit of the central peak in Tycho.
I’m part of a small community of lunar observers, people around the world who watch, sketch or photograph the Moon through telescopes. An even smaller fraction of this amateur group does science, from video monitoring of micrometeorite impacts to low-illumination detection of subtle lunar swells and volcanic domes. Apart from the professional lunar scientists who study the Moon’s cosmo-chemistry and ongoing geological activity (yes, there is some), the world of “lunatics” is a small one. It should be bigger.
The scientists are the ones who brought us news that, mixed within the regolith of “permanently shadowed regions” at the lunar poles, is the stuff of life: water ice. If—and it’s not a trivial if—we can separate the water ice from the lunar dust, then we can drink it, make air and process rocket fuel for further exploration. Would-be lunar entrepreneurs, researchers and policy makers call it “ISRU.” In-situ resource utilization.
Though I do not have any spiritual and religious beliefs about the Moon, I agree with the Diné scientist Alvin Harvey: We must use the Moon’s gifts wisely and carefully. I believe that how we treat places is how we treat we each other. What we do on the Moon is what we do to time. And to our own well-being. If we want things to last, we must take care. We must see the Moon not as a place to colonize but a place to keep home. Not a frontier, but a heartland. Perhaps that care will resonate here on the Earth where human affairs have become, to invoke H.G. Wells, “idiotically prolific.”
Part of care-taking is knowing where we are going. Those of us traveling to the Moon — literally, if you are astronaut, or figuratively, if you are a contributor to Moon Bound, or, intellectually, if you are a scientist — should know the Moon as a world of places.
That first requires looking. And that looking requires an extension of our senses, the telescope. Each of us can become a Galileo, who wrote in The Starry Messenger that “it is most beautiful and pleasing to the eye to look upon the lunar body.”
We must pair seeing with learning. The Moon’s formation caused the Earth’s axial tilt, which gave us seasons, and likely led to better conditions for the evolution of life. The Moon’s phases were an early clock. Moonlight affects the rhythms of animals (though not the menstrual cycle, it turns out). Our companion world pulls on the oceans, lifting them and letting them fall. The mountains of the Moon seen through telescope foreshadowed the development of the sublime, at least in the West. Curiously, telescopes and lunar observation did not much affect other parts of the world until recently, according to Carmen Pérez González and other scholars.
How did the craters form? The maria? Can you find the pip-hole tops of some lunar volcanoes? Did the crater Linné really disappear? How did the names we cast upon the Moon come to be? Finding out how we answered these questions is a lovely adventure.
If you don’t have a telescope, find an astronomy club or see if your library lends them. Borrow a friend’s binoculars. Then read about the dreams of lunar life that began ages ago and persisted into the 20th century. Ponder the deep connections between the Moon and spiritual beliefs. Recite lunar poetry, from Japanese haiku to indigenous tales and chants. Consider the developing history of art on the Moon, from Apollo 15’s Fallen Astronaut sculpture crafted by Paul Van Hoeydonck to our Moon Bound book intended to land as part of a commercial company rover.
This rover and other such missions are part of NASA’s CLPS program—the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which will diversify landing vehicles and allow NASA to focus on science instrumentation. The policy and ethical issues of this developing public/private mix are worth your attention if you care about space and its aspirational hopes.
In short, becoming a lunar being is more than 19th century selenographer James Nasmyth thought it was. For him, it was cultivated by hours at the eyepiece. It still starts there. But the Moon is manifold. And we’ll do it and ourselves a disservice if we are not steeped in lunar science, spirit, arts and politics—and more.
So go outside and look up.
Christopher Cokinos is the author of Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow (Pegasus Books, 2024) and writes poetry, journalism and essays for many publications, including Scientific American, Astronomy, Esquire, the Telegraph and the Los Angeles Times. He’s still bewildered that his writing is going to the lunar surface in Moon Bound.
