To the Moon and Back chapter sampler

To the Moon and Back

bright lights to see most of the stars, so the dark shapes between them are lost as well. When the Indigenous space watchers saw the Emu in the Sky with its legs folded up under its body (or in our terms, the densest part of the Milky Way was rising), they knew that they would have lots of eggs to eat because male emus on Earth would then be sitting on their eggs. Even today you can see Aboriginal rock-art emus near Honeysuckle Creek in the shape of the Emu in the Sky. And still every month the full Moon rises, round and golden, above the tiny creek among the trees — where there was once a space tracking station that followed the journey of the men who travelled to the Moon. HOW WAS THE MOON FORMED? The asteroid collision that helped wipe out the dinosaurs was only a hiccup compared to the collision that made the Moon 4.5 billion years ago! Earth was still molten then. In fact it wasn’t really Earth as we know it today, but a ‘proto-Earth’ — a planet only half the mass it is now. However it was rapidly getting bigger as it gobbled up rubble that had condensed from the dust cloud swirling around the young Sun. A rival planet was also orbiting the Sun dangerously close to our ‘proto-Earth’. This giant blob was about one-

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