The World Wide Web is easy to get tangled in. I started out looking at photos of the Moon transiting Earth, as seen from space! And I ended up reading about False Morels.
From there I started wondering about what the far side of the Moon looks like, since I haven’t really bothered to commit it to memory when I’ve seen it on a poster years ago. Many people refer to the far side as the “dark side”, but they are not the same thing except when the Moon is full (as seen from Earth). On a New Moon, the near side that we typically see, is the dark side of the Moon.
It is completely amazing to me that we hadn’t seen most of the far side until the space age. It’s not like we’d have another way, but it just seems wrong that we’d know so much more about the visible features of distant planets like Jupiter, and nothing about the size of the South Pole Aitken basin crater on the Moon.
From that page I started reading about the Clementine probe, because the name was familiar. And then I was learning about the toxic rocket fuel that I’d heard about before — Monomethyl Hydrazine. The name of the fuel was familiar to me after hearing of the spy satellite several months ago, that was shot down.
It turns out that monomethyl hydrazine is found in trace amounts in False Morel mushrooms, and also the kind you can buy at your local store.
An no, Table Mushrooms don’t grow on the Moon. But in an odd sort of way, they kind of help us get there.
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M@ | 22-Jul-08 at 10:15 am | Permalink
“From there I started wondering about what the far side of the Moon looks like, since I haven’t really bothered to commit it to memory when I’ve seen it on a poster years ago.”
Oh, you totally should’ve asked me. It’s mostly black, with like a ray of light coming from the left side and hitting a prism, and then there’s a rainbow coming out the other side and spreading out.
/As a matter of fact, it’s all dark
Saskboy | 22-Jul-08 at 11:21 am | Permalink
Fortunately I have enough of a grasp on some “old people” pop culture that I knew what you were talking about :-D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Side_of_the_Moon
mushroom | 22-Jul-08 at 1:26 pm | Permalink
No, but I see pink animals.
Matthew James Didier | 22-Jul-08 at 2:39 pm | Permalink
“Old”? Forty-One, dear sir, is not old… That just makes me want to rant like Dennis from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”…
…’cuz yeah, I was getting all “Floydian” briefly there too.
Also, isn’t either the secret US military base on the dark side of the moon… or have I gotten myself confused with that UFO base that’s up there?
Saskboy | 22-Jul-08 at 3:45 pm | Permalink
Whatever is on the FAR side of the Moon, not too many humans have seen it with their own eyes. I’d love to be one of them, but that reminds me that I’ve been neglecting to apply to be an astronaut. It would help if I could spell it consistently without spell check.