![]() Picture now over the barren moonscape in the black sky the large earth in its beautifully refreshing and quiet colors of blue and white. During the moon’s day, in the extremely bright sunlight that is not being diffused and softened, the moonscape has sharp black shadows and offers hardly any color. Also because there is no atmosphere, the moon sky is always black and never blue. Since the moon does not have an atmosphere, there is no dawn or dusk the sun on the moon rises and sets in a flash. ![]() The moon, when rising over our horizon, often can be seen orange or red through a hazy atmosphere, like our sun at dawn and dusk. The color of this large earth is blue, blue with white patches and streaks, offering different patterns of blue and white as the earth rotates on its axis and as cloud cover on earth changes. The earth, having a diameter about 3.7 times larger than the diameter of the moon, should appear in the moon sky as a disk with an area about 13 times larger than the apparent moon in our night sky. The young crescent moon in the western sky on a clear night shows us the full moon disk: one part brightly lit by the sun, the other part, cradled in the bright crescent, dimly illuminated by the then almost full earth. We can observe this shine from down here on earth. The earth shine is at its peak when the earth for the moon is full or almost full. Just as the moon shines onto the earth and brightens our night, the earth shines onto the moon. The moon seen from the earth and the earth seen from the moon are complementary to each other: when the moon appears two-thirds illuminated, then the earth appears one-third illuminated. When the moon is new for us, the earth is full for the moon when the moon waxes, the earth wanes. And so the earth, seen from the moon, also appears in phases: full earth, waning earth, new earth, waxing earth and full earth again. The moon in its illumination by the sun appears in our night sky from month to month in phases: new, waxing, full, waning, and new again.
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