On a clear, cold autumn night, you go outside. The Moon has just ascended, a huge round orange moon. Two weeks later, the moon disappears altogether.

Why does the moon change shape?

What happened Why is the sun always facing us with its round, sparkling face, and does the moon have phases? The moon passes them regularly every month, then increasing, then decreasing, like a balloon, which is inflated, then air is released from it.

In reality, of course, the Moon always remains a sphere, invariably solid and rocky. What actually changes is the magnitude of the visible part of the illuminated surface of the moon.

The moon makes one revolution around its axis in almost the same time that it makes one revolution around the earth (in 27/3 days), so the moon is almost always facing the sun with only one side. But it’s wrong to think that eternal night reigns on one side of the moon. Though slowly, the change of day and night is still taking place.

Why is the moon shining?

What we call moonlight is actually sunlight reflected from a gray rocky moon surface. The moon moves with the earth around the sun and is illuminated by the sun. As the moon moves, we see either a larger or a smaller part of the illuminated surface of the moon, that is, the position of the moon in relation to the Earth changes all the time.

What we call the "phases" of the moon are the angles under which we see the illuminated part of the moon.When we see it fully, this position is called the full moon. When in a few days the Moon becomes “defective”, we already see part of its illuminated half (the first quarter after the full moon).

Interesting fact: Moonlight is sunlight reflected by the moon.

Then the moon decreases by half, then a beautiful horned month appears. When the completely dark half of the moon enters our field of vision, it generally disappears. This position is called the new moon. And indeed, after a short time we again see a silver sickle in the sky, the illuminated half of the moon again enters our field of vision. The moon continues to increase in size and the whole cycle repeats. If you look closely at the crescent of the new moon, you can see the rest of it, although it looks very dark.

To see the full moon every night, it is necessary to launch a rocket into space and hover in it above the illuminated half of the moon, which will be clearly visible even when it is hidden from the eyes of the inhabitants of the Earth. Planets also have phases. Scientists, examining Mercury and Venus through a telescope, observed them in the form of horned months. When the Earth was photographed from space, often spacecraft transmitted satellite images in which our planet also looks like a crippled Moon.