Astronauts Jack Schmitt and Gene Cernan break into song during the Apollo 17 mission of December 1972.

9. Bunny hopping on the moon

Gene Cernan discovers a new and easier way to get around on the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission by jumping with two feet rather than more traditional walking methods.

8. Alan Shepard plays golf

Becoming the first and only person to play golf on the Moon, Alan Shepard takes a couple of shots during the Apollo 14 mission.

7. Armstrong and Aldrin unveil lunar plaque

Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin unveil a plaque left behind on the Apollo 11 mission, which finishes by stating: “We came in peace for all mankind.”

6. Hammer throw

Astronaut Jack Schmitt throws his geology hammer into the distance before Apollo 17 takes off after pleading for permission.

5. Galileo proved corrrect

During the Apollo 15 mission, commander David Scott drops a hammer and feather simultaneously to show that, in a vacuum, all objects fall at the same speed with an absence of air resistance, proving Galileo’s hypothesis.

4. Astronaut takes a tumble

Proving just how difficult it is to cope with the Moon’s weak gravity whilst wearing top-heavy space suits, Jack Schmitt has a couple of falls during the Apollo 17 mission before being called “twinkletoes” by mission control.

3. On board a lunar rover

Astronaut John Young takes the lunar rover out for a spin on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission of April 1972. Although only designed to reach about 8mph (13kph), Young unofficially holds the Lunar Land Speed Record of 11mph (18kph).

2. First man on the Moon

Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to set foot on another celestial body at 0256 GMT on 21 July 1969. Many people believe that he fluffed his famous lines as he stepped on to the surface, missing out the “a” as he proclaimed it was “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” However, listen closely and you can almost make out an “a” just after he said “for”, and Armstrong later insisted that he did say “a man”. What do you think?

1. Last humans on the Moon

Marking the end of NASA’s missions to the Moon, the ascent stage of Apollo 17′s Lunar Module takes off on 14 December 1972. On board were Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Eugene “Gene” Cernan, the last humans to set foot on the Moon. The footage was taken by a camera on the lunar rover left behind on the surface, tracked manually by mission control on Earth.

Our home planet is about 4.5 billion (4,500 million) years old. This date is based on samples from the Earth, meteorites and the moon, which all come from when the Earth first formed. Scientists have looked at radioactive chemicals in the rocks which react into new chemicals over a certain period of time. By working out how many times this reaction has taken place, scientists are then able to determine the age of the rock.

Answered by David Gelsthorpe, Manchester Museum.

Actually lakes do have tides but they are not usually big enough to see. Tides are changing sea levels mostly caused by the moon’s gravitational pull on the Earth. As the moon draws the sea towards it in one place in the world, the sea moves away from the coast somewhere else. The change in sea level depends on the size and location of the sea, how deep it is and the slope of the ocean floor at the coast.

Lakes experience the same gravitational pull, but because they are much smaller than seas their tides are also smaller and so more difficult to detect.

Answered by Kate Mulcahy.

Approximately three times a year, the world experiences a lunar eclipse, when for a brief period of time – ranging from a matter of minutes to hours – the Moon appears a dark red colour, despite being entirely out of sight of the Sun. To understand what’s going on here we need to get to grips with the motion and phases of the Moon as it orbits our planet.

From Earth we only ever see roughly half of the Moon. This is because our natural satellite is tidally locked to our planet, so it orbits with the same side facing towards us (although, due to a slight wobble in its orbit, we can actually see about 59 per cent of its surface from the ground). For this reason the Moon goes through phases in the night sky, depending on where it is in respect of the Sun. During a full Moon the Sun is lighting up the entirety of the half we can see, but when the Sun shines on just the side of the Moon we can only see a thin crescent.

As light from the Sun reaches Earth, not all of it hits the surface. Most of it goes straight past our planet into space. However, at the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere and space, something odd happens. The light from the Sun refracts, or bends, in our atmosphere. As sunlight is white light, it splits into its constituent colours (namely, all of them). Colours with a longer wavelength, like red, refract more than those with a shorter wavelength, like blue.

Thus, in line with the edge of the Earth facing away from the Sun, you get an area known as the penumbra. This is a slightly more diffused circular coned shadow of the Earth that appears behind the planet. Inside the penumbra is an area known as the umbra. This is where the more heavily refracted red light is bent, forming a small shadowed circle out of view of the Sun. If an object like the Moon moves within this narrow cone it will turn a deep shade of red. When it moves out of the umbra and back into the penumbra, it will slowly change back to its more familiar white tone as the non-refracted sunlight hits its surface once again.

How do we know the next lunar eclipse will occur on 10 December 2011?

A lunar eclipse only occurs during a full Moon, when the Moon is directly out of sight of the Sun, but not every full Moon is a lunar eclipse. This is due to the position of our natural satellite in relation to the Sun-Earth plane. Although the Earth orbits in a relatively flat plane around the Sun, the Moon moves up and down in its orbit in three-dimensional space, about five degrees off this plane. Any point at which it crosses the plane is called a node. When a node and full Moon coincide this is when we can observe a lunar eclipse, as the Moon will be completely obscured from the Sun by the Earth.

It takes 27.2 days for the Moon to move from node to node, but 29.5 days for it to go through its full Moon phases, so lunar eclipses will occur at a rate of approximately three a year across the globe. The Moon’s cycle of dancing between nodes and changing to a full Moon is known as the Saros cycle and takes 6,585 days to complete, allowing lunar eclipses to be predicted long into the future.

There is absolutely no danger in observing a lunar eclipse. The light reflected from the Moon poses no threat to your eyesight, unlike solar eclipses, which can be dangerous to view with the naked eye.

Nobody really knows for sure, but moths are thought to use the moon as a point of reference to travel in a straight line. This might help to explain why more moths seem to be attracted to artificial lights on nights when there is no moon. If moths are drawn in very close to a bright light source they may become dazzled, due to their eyes being unable to adjust quickly enough to the sudden brightness, so will circle the light instead of flying away from it.

Answered by Phillip Rispin, Curatorial assistant of Etymology at The Manchester Museum.

Perhaps rather bizarrely, the Moon is actually very dark, and it doesn’t glow for the reasons you might think. The ancients thought that the Moon produced its own light, but we now know definitively that this is not the case. Rather, our Moon reflects the light of the Sun in accordance with its orbit.

The entire Moon does not constantly reflect light – only the half in direct view of the Sun. As the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth (ie we only ever see one face), our view of the lit half changes constantly, ranging from a disc to a thin crescent. On a full Moon, the Sun is directly lined up with the Earth-Moon line; when we see a thin crescent, on the other hand, the Sun is illuminating just the side. However, the Moon does not reflect light quite like a mirror, although it is similar. All objects in space have an albedo, which is a measure of how well they reflect light. To give you an idea of how this works, material like ice has a high albedo, whereas soil has a low albedo.

However, the Moon’s albedo is actually very low – similar to that of coal. Its bright glow is instead the result of something called the opposition effect. You may have come across this when seeing a car’s headlights shine on a dark road: the road appears brighter than it would if light were not incident upon it. The Sun plays the part of the headlight in this case, directly shining on the Moon and leading to its bright glow. The large amount of debris on the surface of the Moon also contributes to its reflectivity.

Asked by Maddy

This all depends on where the moon is in its current lunar cycle. At full moon it is exactly opposite the Sun, giving us a very bright moon in the night sky but nothing during the day. As it gets closer to new moon phase the moon is moving closer to the Sun. This makes it less bright at night but more visible during the day.

The only time the moon is hardly visible to us is when it’s directly between us and the Sun and none of the Sun’s light is reflecting off the moon towards us. If you watch the moon every night for a month you will be able to see the different phases and its varying positions in the night sky.

Tom Cousins, Science Museum

The larger of Mars’s two moons (the other being Deimos), Phobos is not circular in appearance like most other moons in the solar system. At its largest extreme it is 26 kilometres (16 miles) across, but only 18 kilometres (11 miles) across at its shortest.

Eons of meteoroid impacts have given Phobos a rather battered appearance, with dark trails resulting from landslides marking the steep slopes of the large craters on its surface, in addition to a host of smaller craters.

The moon is tidally locked to Mars, and its close proximity to the Red Planet – an average distance of 9,378 kilometres (5,828 miles) above its surface – means that half of the moon has a temperature of -4°C (25°F), while in contrast, the far outward-facing side can drop as low as -112°C (-170°F).

The largest feature on this Martian moon is the Stickney Crater (above), a ten-kilometre (six-mile)-wide crater caused by an impact from a large meteoroid. The crater is full of fine dust and debris, suggesting that boulders slide down its sloped walls and settle further down in the basin.

Phobos is moving 20m (66ft) closer to the Red Planet every 100 years and is expected to crash into the surface of Mars or burn up in its atmosphere within the next 10 million years.

Images courtesy of NASA/JPL

Planets have moons because early in their formation they were introduced to other space- faring rocks that either crashed into the planet and threw off debris, or were trapped in the gravitational pull of the planet. Over billions of years the orbits of these rocks (or debris), now under the influence of the planet’s gravity, were squashed into a spherical shape that kept them encircling their host planet.

To visualise how a moon becomes ensnared, imagine the earth is a ball placed on a floating sheet of frictionless paper (to represent gravity). The ball depresses the paper and if you roll a coin (to represent a moon) around this depressed area at a fast enough speed, it will circle the ball indefinitely.

So, why don’t moons have their own moons? The answer is that the planet they are orbiting has a much stronger gravitational pull, so over time it would selfishly take other objects in as another moon for itself.

There’s a long-held belief that it’s possible to view China’s iconic man-made border from the moon. Though it’s a colossal structure – around 8,850km (5,500 miles) in length with some sections up to 9m (30ft) wide – the idea of being able to see it from the moon is pretty far-fetched.

The fact that the moon’s average distance from Earth is 384,400km (238,900 miles) means that to make out an object the size of the Great Wall would be equivalent of being able to see a strand of human hair from a distance of three kilometres (two miles).

What’s more, the wall’s construction materials – wood, earth and local stone – blend in with the surrounding environment, further inhibiting the wall’s visibility and making it almost impossible to see with the naked eye even from Earth orbit.

While astronauts have debunked the theory that the Great Wall can be seen from the moon – Apollo 12 astronaut said “No man-made object is visible at this scale” – the wall can be imaged by radar other high-resolution equipment.

So in conclusion, despite lasting for over 100 years, the theory that the Great Wall of China is visible from the moon is false.