Influence of the Moon

What's that up yonder in the sky, lighting things up at night? Sometimes it's a crescent, other times it's round, once in a while in the daytime, other times you can't see it at all. In Latin, it's called luna, but those of us who speak English call it the moon. What's it there for, anyway? Well, it has several effects on Earth. The Effect of the Moon / Eugene Boudin / 1891 Old Earth proponents have no idea how it got there, but many hang onto the " impact hypothesis " because that idea offends logic the least. Also, the sun is 400 times larger than the moon, and also 400 times farther away, which makes things interesting during a solar eclipse, and no other planets have that kind of size-distance ratio. (I reckon that those owlhoots who keep getting all excited when they think they've found a "habitable planet" orbiting another star can find out if those planets have useful moons.) The gravity of the moon regulates tides on Ea...