Kaye Shumate, Age 10, Of Camden, S. C., for her question:

What makes the face on the full moon?

Your eye sees the pearly patches on the face of the golden moon, and your Imagination tells you that they remind you of something. Some people see a face on the full moon, some see an old man carrying a load of wood on his back. Others see the portrait of a lady with a fancy hair do. In any case, the dark blotches are made by features on the surface of the moon. The lunar landscape is even more bumpy than the face of the earth.

There are 1evel plains with irregular edges. There are ranges of lofty mountains with ragged peaks there are flat, low lying discs called craters. Some are walled within steep cliffs. And in some craters, needle like pinnacles poke up from the flat floors. The sun shines on this broken landscape with dazzling brilliance, for the moon has no air, no hazy clouds to soften the piercing rays. We see only 7% of the sunshine falling upon the moon, for only this amount of sunlight is reflected by the moon. And all this sunshine beaming down on the moon makes shadows. The brightest parts of the moon are the parts which are getting the most sunshine.

The darker patches are the shady areas. A telescope reveals the shadows cast by the  lunar mountains when the sun is low in the sky. It also reveals the deep and shady circles which are the craters. The large dark areas which look like a face on the moon are level plains maybe carpeted with layers of cindery dust. The astronomers who first mapped the moon noted the mountains arid craters, which  reminded them of features on the face of the earth. They went on to imagine that the large dark areas were like the seas of the earth, but this was going too far. There are no seas, no bodies of water on the face of the moon.

By the time astronomers discovered this mistake., the dark areas had been named maxis, which is the plural of the latin word mare, meaning sea.  There are 14 of these dark mania on the full. Moon, and the largest of them was called an ocean. The mania, which are really flat, lunar plains, cover about half of the full moon, and most of them are in the northern hemisphere.  In the past, even serious minded astronomers thought that the moon exerted influences on the earth and the human family. The mania were given latinized names for these influences. There is Mare Serenitatis, meaning the sea of serenity, and Mare Tranquillitatis, the sea of tranquility. A curve along the edge of one of the plains was thought to be a bay. It was named Sinus Iridum, the bay of rainbows.