Last Saturday saw a first in space travel. A private company working with NASA successfully launched a rocket and put two men into space with the objective of docking with the international space station. My wife and I saw the space station as it passed over that night, a bright moving light. Sadly, we couldn’t see the Space-X Dragon rocket, but with my telescope we did observe the moon on what was a beautiful clear night.

Our affinity for the moon has seen it worshipped by some and its effect on our Earth is very real, with tides very much tied to its gravitational effect.

The moon’s origin is likely to be that in Earth’s early history, Theia, another planetary body, about the size of Mars but no longer in existence, collided with the proto-earth and that resulted in our current Earth and moon. The rock samples brought back from the moon show that its composition is very similar to those on Earth.

In history the moon has been the source of many myths and legends, from werewolves to lunatics. Some of its mysteries are easily explained.

It is not as many think a static object. Like Earth it rotates, but its period of rotation matches that of its orbit around the Earth, so it appears stationary. Its heavily pock-marked and cratered surface show that through its history it has been regularly bombarded by meteorites. The lack of an atmosphere, which protects us from many meteors, leaves the moon vulnerable to being hit.

The Roman goddess Luna was said to ride a silver chariot across the night sky and it is from her that we get the root of the words lunar to describe the moon and lunatic to describe a “crazy” person. In history, the moon has been associated with many human behaviours from sleepwalking to suicide, violence and insanity.

In the 18th century, a plausible defence against murder was calling it an act of lunacy. Sentences were lighter if the defence was accepted. At the same time, psychiatric patients at the London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital, commonly known as Bedlam, would be chained and flogged during a full moon to try and prevent them from running amok.

Researchers have investigated whether the moon affects human behaviour. Plotting a range of behaviours, including violence, actual bodily harm and murder against the cycles of the moon shows no correlation or pattern to indicate that it has any effect. Even bodily cycles, such as ovulation in women, once thought to be tied to the moon, are not linked.

In 1778, the British astronomer Sir William Herschel was convinced there was some form of civilisation resident on the moon. He provided updates from his observations of their progress in building cities and roads.

In the 1820s Bavarian astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen said he had observed cities on the moon. He claimed that the inhabitants, who he called ‘lunarians’, had roads, buildings and fortresses. No other serious scientist or astronomer believed him, but there is a crater named after him on the moon.

The most famous moon claim came in 1835 when an American newspaper published a series of stories detailing the aliens living on the moon and their complex civilisation. They even cited William Herschel’s son as the source of these stories. It was a complete hoax, but many people believed the stories. One of the first ‘fake news’ stories.

An issue still around today is the conspiracy theory which claims that we never went to the moon. The conspiracy “evidence” has been explained, shown to be false and dismissed many times over, but they persist. One key piece of evidence is the US flag appearing to flutter in a breeze which cannot exist on the moon, but it is simple physics. They planted the flag with a twisting motion which makes the flag appear to flap. With no atmosphere, the fluttering continues longer than you would expect as there’s no air resistance to stop the movement. Buzz Aldrin famously lost his temper with one such conspiracy theorist who kept badgering him to admit it was all fake. At the age of 72, he apparently delivered a well-timed punch to the conspiracy theorist’s jaw. Aldrin was never charged as it was clear he was provoked. It was accepted as an act of self-defence.

One of the weirdest moon claims is that towards the end of the Second World War the Nazis had rocket technology that allowed them to travel there and establish an underground base. It was claimed Adolf Hitler had faked his own death and then fled to the moon base where he lived out the rest of his life.