Transcript for September 5th and 6th

RACHEL
Welcome to Idaho Skies for September 5th and 6th. We’re your hosts, Rachel…

PAUL
…and Paul.

RACHEL
Look for earthshine this week.

PAUL
That’s the reflection of sunlight from Earth illuminating the moon’s night side.

RACHEL
Technically, there is no dark side of the moon.

PAUL
That’s because each hemisphere gets two weeks of daylight each month.

RACHEL
There is however, a far side.

PAUL
The lunar far side was terra incognita until 1959.

RACHEL
That’s the year when the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 took pictures of the moon as it passed behind its far side.

PAUL
The inability to see the far side of the moon from Earth let people like George Adamski make claims that UFO bases where located there.

RACHEL
Adamski was a con artist and among the first of the UFO contactees of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

PAUL
That’s when a UFO craze was sweeping across the US.

RACHEL
And people like Adamski could make serious bank lecturing about unidentified flying objects.

PAUL
Today, because of space flight, humans know the moon’s far side better than some of the deepest parts of Earth’s oceans.

RACHEL
One thing we discovered was that the far side of the moon has nearly no lunar maria.

PAUL
Or those large seas of frozen lava that makes the familiar Man on the Moon feature that we see.

RACHEL
Why is it that there are no maria on the moon’s far side?

PAUL
Perhaps the moon’s crust is thicker on the far side.

RACHEL
That’s Idaho Skies for the 5th and 6th of September.

PAUL
Be sure to follow us on Twitter @IdahoSkies for this week’s event reminders and sky maps.

For Idaho Skies this is Paul…

RACHEL
…and Rachel.

PAUL
Dark skies and bright stars.