When you look at the moon from earth, it looks soft with light and dark shades of blue and gray. The dark parts of the moon are extensive, flat plains that were first observed by Galileo, an Italian scientist. He was the first person to look at the moon through a telescope in 1609. He, perhaps, thought that the plains were water because he called them "maria," which is a Latin would that means Seas. Today we have discovered that they are actually huge, deep, holes with edges covered by rock and soil. The word "maria" appears to imply that there is water on the moon, but we now know that there is none on its surface.

Three hundred and eighty two kilograms of rock samples were collected by the Apollo and Luna programs. These samples helped us gain most of our knowledge about the Moon. Scientist today are still using the same lunar samples .

We see two small bulges from our perspective on the earth. One is in the direction of the Moon and the other is opposite of it. The result of this is much stronger in the ocean than in the solid crust so it makes the water bulge higher. Because the earth rotates a lot faster than the Moon, the bulges move around the Earth about once a day, which is why we have two high tides a day.

No one really knows how maria were formed, but one theory is that they were caused by huge meteorite collisions millions of years ago when the core of the moon was still hot. The impact would have caused extreme heat that melted the surface and released molten rock that formed into maria.

The moon has no fixed place in the sky because it is always moving. It doesn't follow a perfect circle in its path around the Earth and it always shows the same side to the Earth. More than half the moon, or about 59 percent of it, is seen.

There are basically two types of terrain on the moon. The highlands, which are very old and cratered and there is the maria. The maria cover about sixteen percent of the moon's surface. Most of the surface is covered with a mixture of very fine dust and rocky debris called regolith.

Features like "the man in the moon" are a combination of mountain peaks, craters, deep narrow valleys, and maria. The largest maria is called Mare Imbrium, which means Sea of Rains. Maria are surrounded by huge mountains and many were given the names like Alps and Pyrenees, just like the earth mountain ranges. The biggest lunar range is the Leibnitz, which is 30,000 feet high.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Moon Scientist, Alps Pyrenees, North Pole, Galileo Italian, , Earth Earth, Edwin Aldrin, Copernicus Kepler, China Cheng, Neil Armstrong, sun moon, craters moon, water moon, moon earth, moon appears, pull earth's water, moon doesn't, moon's surface, earth day, moon it's, solar winds, occur sun moon, tides occur sun,
Approximate Word count = 1295
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)