this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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Glamour shot or our shield. Literally - the far side of the moon absorbs many small meteorites that might otherwise hit Earth. That's why it has no large mare, it's just oops all craters. Artemis II found 3 new craters since the last time the far side had been mapped in detail.
These types of photos always do remind me of the fact that we live in an incredibly hostile universe. Helps me to appreciate how lucky we are to have this watery rock with a big bubble around it to live on.
Just be glad you're not at the insect scale. Talk about hostile!
To be fair a lot of meteors hit earths atmosphere and disintegrate. Poor moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to protect it though
Yeah but the one time (we think we know of) that we collided with another planet, the moon didn't even show up until just after. Fucking slacker.
And ever since then, it's been edging farther and farther away, like it has better things to do than take meteors to the face for us (and asteroids to the ass). We need some sort of tether or leash to keep it where it is.
Which just happens to be when it's the same apparent size as the sun, a lucky coincidence for anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing one, because this might be the only place in the entire galaxy where such a thing even happens.
The Moon was probably just scared of dinosaurs.
What's kind of crazy about the perceived distance thing is that timing of being in this planet now also plays a factor. 100 million years ago a 1ish% relative size larger might have made for far fewer annular eclipses. Or more, I can't find any info on that, but I expect fewer annular and more total eclipses. Of the 224 eclipses this century, 72 are annular and 68 total.
But it's all part of this scifi bonkers planet. Our star makes us have crazy light rivers in the sky at the poles because molten iron inside the planet is spinning faster than the outside of the planet to make giant magnetic currents. The crust isn't even solid, it's a slow moving chunky ice flow of silicates, like some busted-ass pie pulled straight from the oven. Huge deposits of dead trees and other early life got buried and remained intact as seams or seas of hydrocarbons, just hanging out. In some places the life that evolved here can die and get buried and some of the remains turned into stone versions of itself. We can bounce radio waves of the inside of the atmosphere and the magnetic currents for our convenience.
Sorry, but it always sends me down a rabbit hole of how weird this place is and we just get used to it.