A number of readers with sharp eyes or more time on their hands have written to me about what happens when you zoom in all the way on the Google Moon map. I won’t say what happens.

All I will say is that I would have expected it to be green :). I guess the point of this is that it points out once again that Google, as one of the largest companies in the world, still hasn’t lost its sense of humor.

The Moon is Earth’s only natural satellite. It has no formal name other than “The Moon” although it is occasionally called Luna (Latin for moon) to distinguish it from the generic “moon”. Its symbol is a crescent. Apart from the word lunar, the terms selene/seleno- and cynthion (from the Lunar deities Selene and Cynthia) refer also to the Moon (aposelene, selenocentric, pericynthion, etc.).

The average distance from the Moon to the Earth is 384,403 kilometers (238,857 miles). The Moon’s diameter is 3,476 kilometers (2,160 miles).

Between 1969 and 1972, the U.S. Apollo program landed twelve men on the Moon, the first of whom were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in Apollo 11. The first men sent to the Moon were Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders, in Apollo 8. Before and since that time, the Moon has been the target of numerous landing and orbiting space probes, starting with the Soviet Luna 1 in 1959. [Encyclopedia Lockergnome]