Terri Voskuhl, age 11, of Marshall, Okla., for her question:

WHAT ARE THOSE DARK SPOTS ON THE MOON?

Those dark patches on the golden moon look somewhat like eyes and wide open mouth. This, no doubt, explains why we talk about the Man in the Moon. Naturally this notion is ridiculous. But for centuries astronomers also had a wild idea about those dark spots on the moon.

Early astronomers imagined that the lunar landscape was similar to the earth's. Their telescopes revealed mountains, which they named for well known ranges on our globe. They assumed that the dark patches must be seas, similar to the earth's watery oceans. For this reason they called them the lunar maria, which is the plural form of the olden word mare, meaning sea.

A detailed map of the moon gives the names of the dark areas either as Latin maria or English seas. For example, one very large irregular shape area is named mare Ibrium, alias the Sea of Storms. This was the landing site of the Apollo 12 astronauts. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed in the Sea of Tranquility  and an earthling astronaut named Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon.

Apollo missions 15 and 17 landed beside a dark area which was named the Sea of Serenity. But they did not expect to find themselves on beaches beside watery lunar seas. Astronomers already knew that those dark areas are rather flat, lunar lowlands covered with loose, lunar dirt. From the earth, they look darkish gray because they reflect less sunlight in our direction.

The old timers were right about the lunar mountains. These are the highlands that reflect more of the sun's golden light. Seen from the earth without a telescope, the moon's face appears to be bright, shiny highlands and shadowy lowlands.  Here and there we see a few round craters that reflect shadows and sunshine, depending on the sun's position in the lunar skies.

Ages ago, the surface of the moon was bombarded with countless meteors, large and small.  Only a few of the larger craters are visible from the earth. But close ups reveal many thousands of round craters, some no wider than an inch or so.

Strange to say, the dark areas were misnamed seas by one of history's greatest astronomers. He was the great Galileo and in 1609 he became the first earthling to behold the face of the moon through a telescope. We can forgive him for his mistake because, after all, his small, homemade telescope only magnified by about 30 times.