happy hunter

That's last night's waning gibbous moon, not Tuesday's full hunter moon. I forgot to go out and look at the full moon on Tuesday (what a Sukkot it must have been!) but I did get to see it on a friend's cel phone yesterday, it was very pink and heavily pixelated. I'm not inspired by the name of this month's moon, I never have been, because hunting makes me sad. Even though I know some very beautiful creatures devour things, not just folks who get an enormous rush from shooting their guns.

I have a bad attitude about hunting, even though it's in my blood, as it is in everyone's. But I do most of my hunting on the internet, where I found something I sought recently, a book on Lunar Rocks coauthored by my father, William Melson, in 1970, with a geologist named Brian Mason. I'd seen it around our house when I was very young and I've been proud of him but never thought of hunting it down. It was no fairy tale. The other day it suddenly occurred to me that I could probably go online and buy that book, and sure enough, I found it on Amazon offered by a used book dealer.

My copy's arrival synchronized with the full moon. The hard cover was formerly of the Saratoga Springs library, where it appears it was never checked out. I scanned it for words I wasn't familiar with. This list went on and on... vuggy, euhedral, platy, breccias, rilles, laccolithic intrustions... Oh yeah, that's why I never read the book.

I think everyone used to joke about how, as a nation, we'd found out the moon isn't made of cheese. But some, thinking the moon landing was a hoax, still wait for proof. Once I asked my dad what he thought about that conspiracy theory, which must have been annoying to him. A more intelligent question would have been to ask if the research supported the idea that the moon was a piece of the earth, knocked free by a large asteriod, leaving the earth tipsy, and slightly empty, like someone robbed of a kidney.

Actually, the moon is made of caviar. That's what they found out. Below, Lunar regolith, or moon soil, which contains a wide variety glass particles. The average size is .2mm.