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If you are outside this weekend make sure you look up at the moon in the night sky. If you see a full moon, all the better! But what does it mean when there is a full moon? Why do we always see different amounts of the moon on different days?

Since the beginning of human life, we have been looking up at this mysterious object in the sky and wondered about where it came from and why it is there. Test your “Moon” knowledge by trying to answer the following questions before you read the answers.

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We can see things during the day because of the big, bright, shiny sun that glows in the sky and illuminates the earth. But did you know that the sun is actually just a star, similar to all of the other stars that light up our night sky.

The sun is in fact the only star in our solar system. All of the other stars in the sky are located in other solar systems. Those other solar systems might also have planets in them that orbit around stars, just like our solar system, which has nine planets that orbit the sun. We do not know for sure. There could be people just like you and me on a far away planet that is orbiting around one of those far away stars. Or, there could be life on another planet that is different from what we know on earth. Imagine all the possibilities!

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An eclipse of the Moon can only occur at a Full Moon, and only if the Moon passes through a part of the Earth’s shadow. It takes the Moon 29.5 days to orbit the Earth, and usually it does so without passing through the Earth’s shadows. But every once in a while, the Moon will pass through Earth’s pale outer shadow called the penumbra and the dark inner shadow, called the umbra. When this happens, the Earth blocks all direct sunlight from the Moon causing a total lunar eclipse.

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In August and September of 1977, NASA made an attempt to talk to aliens. It’s not exactly what you might think however. They didn’t meet any little green men with big eyes coming out of a flying saucer. But they did send out two spacecrafts with some information about Earth in hopes that there would be some sort of space civilization that might find it.

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Have you ever wondered what the earth would look like out of a space shuttle? Have you ever looked up at the stars and thought that you could be an astronaut? Well, there’s nothing saying you can’t. In fact, that very thing happened on July 22, 1999. Five people were given the opportunity to fly into space and remain there for 4 days, 22 hours and 50 minutes.

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