The real question is, is the moon itself guilty, or could the Sun be the real troublemaker. Rainy days make us feel tired and less happy than when the bright sun is shining down on us. Might it not be possible that we also feel more active when the nights are lighted by the moon, which shines by reflected sunlight?

Many of us may recall being told as a child about the man in the moon. Indeed when we look at the moon, the light and dark patches seem to resemble the face of a man.

Perhaps many of us have wondered just who is the man in the moon. Jules Verne is not a bad answer, in his classic story, Verne took a trip to the moon, but he is not the traditional man in the moon.

Neil Armstrong was also the "man in the moon" when he became the first human to set foot on another world, but "man in the moon" stories go back centuries, nearly every culture on Earth has seen a man, or woman or some other figure in the moon.

One culture tells of a woman who was a famous gypsy, and could foretell the future, all except, that is, the end of the world, which she badly wanted to foresee. This angered her and she complained about it incessantly, until in anger, father time swept her up and placed her on the moon so she would no longer be heard complaining. And there she sits, muttering to herself, knitting yarn, while her cat constantly unravels her project as punishment.

Stories abound, but they are all based on figures seen in the light and dark patches on the moon. So, the real man in the moon is the dark patches, which are the lunar maria, or "Maria Lunis" if you prefer.

The mare, plural of maria, are what Galileo called "lunar seas" when he observed them through the telescope. In fact, they are seas, but not of water. The lunar maria are lava flows from an earlier time on the moon, the flows have long since stopped and are now the dark rocks we see as the features of the man in the moon.

Over the past decades we have learned much about the moon from the satellites and manned rockets we have sent there. The manned Apollo missions to the moon certainly added new meaning to the words "man in the moon."