THE MOON
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The moon had always been the mystery in the sky for ancient civilizations, It really wasn't until the era of the Greek and Romans in which scholars looked at the moon more scientifically. In reality no specific person straight up "discovered" the moon because the moon formed only a little after the earth was created. Every singal living thing on earth has seen the moon. That being said, there where very many discoveries concerning the moons structure, movement and purpose. Babylonian astronomers around the 5th century B.C were the first to record a full Saros cycle of lunar eclipse which took them 18 years. Archimedes then later on designed a planetarium to calculate e the motions of the moon and other objects in the solar system. In the philosophy of Aristotle, the moon signified the lines between the spheres of the mutable. Thomas Harriot, who observed the moon for many years,drew the first telescopic drawing of the moon.
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Galileo played a large part in uncovering the moons secrets one of those being that the moon was not perfectly smooth as everyone had believed. Galileo created his own telescope and gazed at the moon in full detail; he soon discovered that the moon was not spherical. How did he come to this conclusion? Well Galileo was able to pick many small dark spots on the moon in which he had never seen before. The spots varied with the angle of solar illumination, through time he watched as the light spots in the unilluminated part of the moon slowly merged with the illuminated parts, those weird dark spots turned out to be shadows.
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The moon has a large part in the tides on earth, although not many had thought of the moon to have remotely to do with the tides until once again Galileo showed up and created another theory about the tides (Which you can see explained in The Tides section of the website). Tides occur when gravitational forces of the moon and even the sun are perpendicular to each other, thus creating a neap tides, which occur during quarter moons.