Tonight was supposed to bring forth the Pink Moon, the biggest supermoon of 2020.
Alas, it’s raining buckets. But like the Post Office and coronavirus, we’re not gonna let a little thing like precipitation spoil the genuflecting. So here’s a rain-delay FactSlap (lunar edition):
- A full day on the moon, from one sunrise to the next, lasts about 29.5 Earth days on average.
- No one has been on the Moon in the last 41 years.
- The moon is moving away from us by 1 1/2 inches a year.
- It would take less than 6 months to get to the moon by car at 60 mph.
- The beautiful symmetry of a total solar eclipse happens because —by pure chance— the sun is 400 times larger than the moon, but is also 400 times farther from Earth, making the two bodies appear the exact same size in the sky.
- When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, they honored soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin by leaving behind one of his medals.
- The moon is not round, but egg-shaped.
- If there are two full moons in the same month, the second one is called blue moon.
- The American flags placed on the moon are now white due to radiation from the sun.
- Sending a man to the Moon and finding Osama Bin Laden cost the US government about the same amount of time and money: 10 years and $100 billion.
