There's a moon in the sky

It's called the moon! That, for the uninitiated, is from an old B52's song. I LOVE the B52's. It's just unfortunate that we don't get to see anything of them over here in the UK, although I understand there's a new album on the way if they can find a record label. (And I know it should be B52s and not B52's, but that's their name, so that's how I write it).

Yes, the moon. You don't seem to notice it that much, apart from when it's full. However, I've noticed how quickly it goes through its phases since I installed that moon phase chart thing on the blog. It's already a waning crescent. Spooky. It was great the other morning as it was setting around 7am. It's starting to get light at that time now so it was glowing this sort of orange/yellow colour against a blue winter's sky - it was MASSIVE and very low in sky.

Planetary movements and concepts of space/time, are things that you can either get your head round or you can't. I can't. It's shameful that I'm ignorant of the order of planets from the sun in our solar system. I couldn't tell you which one is largest. I always get mixed up between Saturn and Jupiter. I'm not sure I could even name them all. A challenge then: Earth, Mars, Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto, errrm, bollocks, Mercury, crap, Venus (I had to look that one up).

Let's try this... There's a sun and there are a few (is it nine?) planets that orbit the sun. Each planet takes a certain length of time to achieve this, for Earth, it's about 365 days. So far so good. The orbits are eliptical. Errrrm, and the planets spin around while they conduct their dances through the atmosphere (is there an atmosphere up there?). It takes the Earth a day to do a spin, and depending on where it is in its orbit around the sun, we get a different amount of daylight. And the temperature changes too (not much in England, but it does).

Nah, too confusing. All I know is it's bloody cold still and it's still far too dark. No idea what the moon does; I suppose it just sits there, its shape changing because of its relationship to Earth and the sun sort of shining on it a bit but Earth casting a shadow I suppose.

Why don't the planets collide?

I think people who work for the space agencies must be off their heads or on drugs or something.

I'll stick to earthly notions, it's much better for my mental health that way.