From the book "Man and the Universe: A journey full of surprises in space, across the stars and the Earth; The progress of science and the atom. Translated and edited by Joseph Frost. It is not specified who the original authors are.
From the private library of the site editor
Hadar Publishing House, Tel Aviv, XNUMX.
"The moon," explains the astronomer, "is a dead world." Its mass includes only the eightieth part of the land's mass. Because of this he was unable to attach any aura of air to him. But where an aura of air is missing, water is also missing. After all, air for breathing and water are the basic conditions for the existence of organic life. We therefore have no possibility of existing on the surface of the moon. But this fact should not prevent us from paying a visit to the star, which is our neighbor in space.
In our flight we glide over the black fields of that lifeless world, visible to our eyes as bright and as glittering as silver only in the part exposed to the sunlight and only above the surface of the earth. We see the strange landscape, strewn with strange mountain ranges, which have no equal on the face of the earth, and whose cliffs rise in different and unusual forms towards the sky, while the "grooves" with their steep sides, deep ravines and cracked valleys cross vast areas. Our gaze wanders over ravines dark to the point of horror, whose black shadows seem to hide terrible secrets, and even though our mind tries to convince us that no living soul could live in this desert, our imagination plays with us as it wishes. A pitch-black and menacing sky stretches over the vast, waterless and gloomy surface of the deserts, which are visible from the surface of the earth as dark spots, and which are called by the astronomers in the Sagi language "seas": mare serenitatis - the Sea of Serenity; mare tranquilitatis - the calm sea (later the name was adopted the peaceful sea, AB); mare fuecunditatis - the sea of fertility; lacus somnirum - the lake of dreams.
On the side of the moon lit by the sun, the heat reaches 120 + degrees Celsius if there were really days there. Their waters must boil and evaporate immediately! On the night side of Lavin-Haretz there is a cold of one hundred and sixty degrees below zero.
The strange and one-of-a-kind mountains of our neighbor, which cover its face like huge stone rings, when they cross each other and intermingle many times, the lunar explorers named after great people, thereby erecting one-of-a-kind tombstones for them. That's how one mountain range in the eastern half of Galgal Hera was called 'Copernicus'; Shani, located even further east, bears the name "Kepler". Above the southern shore of the 'Cold' sea rises the "Aritatotles" ridge. In the middle of Galgal Hira rises the huge "Ptolemaic" (Ptolemaeus) ridge in the form of a wreath of upright cliffs. In its wild landscape, the rugged mountain range "Alphonsus" in the south does not fall from it. And to the west - the distant mountain ranges "Hiparchus" and "Albategenius", huge ridges created by cosmic forces. In the Northern Hemisphere, between the Apennines of the Moon and the Carpathians of the Moon, the "Aristosthenes" ridge rises.
Up to a height of two thousand, three thousand and five thousand meters rise the rock walls of the mountain ranges. One of the most enormous sights on the surface of the moon is the mountainous plain "Clavium", it encompasses an area of approximately forty-five thousand square kilometers, within which the entire Land of Israel on both sides of the Jordan could be swallowed up. (Obviously, this is a comment by the translator and editor, Yosef Khrost).
How were the mountain ranges formed on the earth's satellite? Most researchers of the moon see them as craters formed by the fall of huge meteorites. After all, traces of meteorites are also known on the earth, which, admittedly, fell of a few from a hundred whose dimensions do not reach those of the mountain ranges on the surface of the moon. A typical example of such a "lunar crater" can be the "Diablo" valley in Arizona. Five thousand years ago at the earliest, and seven hundred years ago at the latest, a meteorite of unusually large iron must have fallen there. When it fell to the ground, it created a crater in the ruined earth, whose diameter reaches one thousand three hundred meters, and is surrounded by a rampart forty and fifty meters high. The bottom of the crater is about two hundred meters below the surface of the desert.
Other meteor craters on Earth are found near Odessa in Texas, on Ezel Island in the East, near Hanbury in Australia, on the Aleutian Island of Amak and on the Gold Coast in Africa (now Ghana, AB). But the difference between the surface of the moon and the surface of the earth is so obvious that it is a problem in itself.
It is possible that the bulk of the mountain ranges were formed while the earth's surface was liquid and hot, while the small moon from the earth, which cooled quickly from it, hardens and goes. Then giant clumps began to migrate within the solar system. In their flight through interplanetary space, they collided with the Earth and the Moon. They disappeared without a trace in the sea of bubbling fire of the earth, while they gave the surface of the cooling moon its unique form.
The cosmic bullets that shaped the surface of the moon must have had dimensions worthy of their name, if they left traces the size of the ridges Ptolemy and Albatgenius. It is necessary, of course, to take into account that meteors travel through space at a speed of over seventy kilometers per second! And if we also take into account that the weight on the moon is six times smaller than on the earth, we can somewhat understand the power of the cosmic bombardment.
Against the theory of the bombardments presented above, it is claimed that even now the formation of the lunar mountains should have been noticed, if they really originated from meteor bombardments. To this we must answer: If we estimate the number of ridges of our neighbor the moon at approximately forty thousand and if we assume that the age of the moon is four billion years, then we will easily find that the bombardment of a large meteor occurs once every hundred thousand years.
The fact that the age of the ridges is different speaks in favor of the bombardment theory. There are mountain ranges with a very clear shape and in contrast there are those that show all the signs of the effects of the steep temperature changes from one hundred and twenty degrees above zero to one hundred and sixty degrees below zero. However, there are researchers who see these circular ridges as the edges of smallpox, which formed on the surface of a halo while still hot-liquid and which hardened over the years. In the eyes of the daring space pilots, the first humans to set foot on the moon's satellite soil would discover an unusual picture in the moon's night sky: without twinkling, the stars rest in the black abyss of the universe, as if they were frozen lights. Inside the dome of heaven hangs our cosmic homeland, the earth, as a huge globe (3,4 times larger than the full moon hanging above the surface of the earth). According to the place, where the observer stands on the surface of the moon, the earth is in Zenit or somewhere else on the horizon of the moon. But it floats without changing you. Its place in the sky, without rising and without setting, as if it had been fixed in that place forever and ever by a magic staff. After it we move slowly and majestically the stars, whose groups are not different from those we know.
The unusual phenomenon of the earth being fixed in its place originates from the fact that the moon always faces our planet on the same side. That is, it rotates on its axis exactly once during one revolution around us. Thus day and night on a hyra last twenty-nine and a half days of the earth.
The fixed earth (despite its slight fluctuations) is not rigid and frozen after all. She is constantly changing her phases. From the gray and sparkling "Earth in its renewal" like phosphorus to the dazzling and dazzling "Earth in its fill", the Rehi shows all the forms of the moon. However, on the sun-washed "Earth in Miloa", the seas and oceans appear to the eyes of the space travelers as dark areas, from which rise the continents with their pale yellow or green faded shapes. The cloud fields migrate as they spread a blinding light over the earth. In silver colors, like a tiara-horns, shines the eternal ice region of the pole.
The continent, floating majestically across the globe, can only be Africa. The Gulf of Guinea compares to the "dark part of the country" for its unusual shape. Suddenly a flash of lightning passes by the African coast, bright and dazzling, as if a hydrogen bomb had exploded in the Atlantic Ocean. The people on the moon, seeing this spectacle for the first time, shrink in terror: what does this light mean? A few seconds pass, until the realization penetrates the minds of the space travelers that the mysterious lightning is nothing more than the appearance of sunlight on the face of the sea.
After a long night - the sunrise on the moon! No dawn heralds the coming of the day, because up there there is no halo of air to diffuse the light. Nevertheless, a forerunner walks before the sun: the ghostly glow of the crown of the sun, appearing in a pale, lifeless, strange light across the black sky and then suddenly shines the blinding light of the sun, as it is reflected back from the summits of the high mountains. Slowly and with wonderful majesty, the star-of-the-day floats in the broken horizon of the moon.
But the land is getting smaller and smaller, it will get smaller and smaller. In a little while, the "renewed cedar" will stand between the sun and its companions, and the space travelers will be. Witness a wonderful phenomenon, the eclipse of the moon on the surface of the moon. The dark earth will bear a crown of light, when the rays of the sun standing behind it will shatter into the earth's atmosphere, and on the face of the moon everything will glow with a red and menacing light, as if reflected in the coming of a global conflagration.
The moon always shows the same side to the earth, so we don't know what the hemisphere that is always hidden from us looks like. There were those who had imaginations who claimed that the moon resembles a swamp that has been cut off towards the earth - this edge is visible from the air halo of the moon, in the half of the moon hidden from our eyes there are flowing and dry days, where flourishing life developed.
In fact, hidden from our eyes, due to a certain vibration of the sphere, more than half of its area has been lost, but as our telescopes reach, a still, rock-strewn land appears in front of us, devoid of any life. Nevertheless, two-fifths of the world neighboring us is still considered an unsolved secret, the ultimate solution of which awaits future Hera travelers. (And of course, Russian and American spacecraft circled the moon in the later sixties and discovered that its other side is not much different from the side facing us).
The diameter of the moon reaches 3476 kilometers and it is on average 384.304 kilometers from the earth, that is sixty times the diameter of the earth. Its specific gravity, compared to water, is 3.34. Its simulated light is – 12.55. The highest mountains rise to a height of thousands of meters. The rate of temperature fluctuations on the surface of the moon reaches two hundred and eighty degrees!
According to these researchers, there have also been changes in the world next to us. Thus, for example, in the mouth of Poseidon in the west of the Milky Way, color changes were determined, as if a gray mist rested over the mouth. According to the observations of one of the researchers, a strange change occurred in the small mouth of Lina on the eastern shore of that sea. The famous American astronomer Pickering claimed to have noticed the movements of shadows above the mouth of Artosthenes on the northern shore of the Sea of Rain. This or that researcher may have fallen victim to a hallucination; However, the Earth's satellite still keeps many secrets.
