Earth Moon

Today was the first day of a new term, six weeks now until Easter, and it was the first session proper delivered to the secondary school in our rotation. The last time I was there was a taster session delivered to a great bunch of kids with a bundle of attitude. I love these kids. Today's session was delivered to their GCSE class with a couple of 'stepper-uppers', i.e. talented students from lower years. The subject was the Earth - Moon system, and I managed to export a great deal of knowledge in 45 minutes. We covered libration:



Libration is a 'wobble' observed in the Moon's orbital motion as it faces Earth. The GIF above demonstrates this by showing the motion greatly accelerated. 50% of the surface of the Moon is visible from Earth at any one time, but thanks to libration it is possible to see 59% of the Moon's surface can be observed.

We also talked about eclipses, total, partial and annular. We covered the landings, including a thorough debunking of the Moon Landing conspiracies, each with accompanying explanations of why they are so preposterous, and this is a very useful tool actually, an easy way to cover a diverse knowledge base very quickly. After that we had a general chat about the Apollo missions, Apollo 13 and various interesting elements of the missions like the Lunar Rover, the geography and topography of the Moon and a little about the formation.

It was a Monday morning lesson, sleeps heads in some ways, but nonetheless a great lesson and the shock and awe in the face of how cool astronomy is was absolutely clear.

Song.