Have you ever wondered about that? The sun is up, it’s the middle of a beautiful day, and you look up at the sky and you see….the moon. What? How is that possible anyway? You can see the sun and the moon in the same stretch of sky at the same time. It makes me wonder, if I’m seeing both the sun and the moon in broad daylight, what are the people on the other side of the world looking at? Probably the insides of their eyelids considering that when it’s mid-day here, it’s mid-night there.
I wonder if the people in the far East can see the moon at the same time that we are seeing the moon or are they simply deprived of its presence? Of course, I know they are not, and that the Earth is round, which makes the far-away moon “appear” to be overhead, when really it’s actually seen only in full color 3-dimensional glory on a sound stage in Hollywood.
Just kidding, but sometimes I have to wonder about this problem. The sun does not appear in two places at once. It shines on one side for awhile, gives that side of Earth a good tan, then shines on the other side for a while, but it is absolutely not seen on both sides at the same time. But for some odd reason, the moon is. Now either the Scientists have been lying to us all this time and there are really two moons orbiting the Earth, or something really strange is going on here. No wonder folks have always been so certain that the full moon brings out the craziness in people. It brings out craziness in itself!
To make matters even weirder, the moon never rotates, but always keeps the same face to us and the same face to space. How are we even supposed to know that the moon is not completely flat? Oh sure, astronauts have gone up there and looked at the dark side of the moon, but conveniently, their radio transmissions from the dark side are always eaten up by static, so the world can never hear them exclaim, “Holy cow! Look, Bubba, that sucker’s flat as a pancake!”
I know that NASA has a completely different argument but they never have tried to explain why both sides of the Earth can see the moon at the same time, although we have to take turns using the sun’s light. I guess it’s just one of those mystical things that will never be explained away, like how in the world they managed to get that little man with the Windex stuffed under my car’s hood. I let him out every once in a while to wash my windshield, when the bug spatters get particularly thick.
So, the next time you look up at the moon, remember, I’m looking at it too, and so are the people in Egypt, and Ireland, and Sweden, and Russia, and Australia and Wisconsin. We all see it, and we are all with you, carrying moon-beams home in a jar.
