Lunar Phases

 

What Are Lunar Phases?

Our Moon doesn't shine, it reflects. Just like daytime here on Earth, sunlight illuminates the Moon.

We just can't always see it.

When sunlight hits off the Moon's far side — the side we can't see without from Earth the aid of a spacecraft — it is called a new Moon.

When sunlight reflects off the near side, we call it a full Moon.

The rest of the month we see parts of the daytime side of the Moon, or phases. These eight phases are, in order, new Moon, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full Moon, waning gibbous, third quarter and waning crescent. The cycle repeats once a month (every 29.5 days).



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Burj Khalifa: The tallest building in the world

Image
  Burj Khalifa: The tallest building in the world Since its completion in 2010, the world's tallest skyscraper has been Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The building, which was designed by the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is a mighty 828 meters tall and has 163 floors. Burj Khalifa is one of Dubai's most famous buildings. Its potential successor, Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, is however already in the starting blocks: At a kilometer in height, this ambitious construction project, which was started in 2013, is due to surpass the current record holder by some distance. Everything about the Burj is superlative and involves huge numbers: there were more than 12,000 people from all over the world who worked on the construction of the Burj Khalifa.
Read more

The smallest mammal

Image
Bumblebee bat is world’s smallest It’s a hummingbird… it’s a bumblebee… it’s Kitti’s hog-nosed bat. Yes, seriously, look at it: it’s a bat. A teensy, tiny, teeny, weeny bat. Kitti’s hog-nosed bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai) is debatably the world’s smallest mammal and most definitely the world’s smallest bat. Informally known as the bumblebee bat, Kitti’s hog-nosed bat is about the size of a large bumblebee, weighing in at just two grams — about the weight of two Skittles. Again, seriously. It’s also just one of around 440 bat species found in Asia — a continent that houses more than one third of the world’s 1,200 bat species. “It is [an] incredibly tiny creature — even smaller than my thumb (though I have small hands already),” researcher Pipat Soisook told Mongabay.   A well-known bat expert (a chiropterologist), Soisook is the mammal curator at the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Natural History Museum in Thailand, one of only two countries where Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, or th
Read more