About the Blog

 (Credit: “Rose is Rose,” by Pat Brady, 10/9/2002.)

Who Hung the Moon? is a blog devoted to all things lunar. I expect that most of the content will be about lunar science, but not all. I will write on occasion about appearances of the moon in literature, television, movies, and other parts of our culture (even comics!).

This blog takes its name from the working title of a book that I wrote six years ago, which was published by John Wiley & Sons: The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be. (See “About the Book” for more information.) It’s a figure of speech my grandfather used to employ often. If you “think so-and-so hung the moon,” that is another way of saying that you are a great admirer of said person.

Eventually, my editor and I decided that “Who Hung the Moon?” was not an appropriate title for the book. The main reason, for him, was that book titles should not be in the form of a question. This was news to me — hadn’t he ever heard of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”? But I was concerned that “hung the moon” might be an idiom from a specific region — the American South — that not everyone would understand. And finally, “Who Hung the Moon?” didn’t quite say what the book was about. The title we chose, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be, was a much more straightforward description of the book’s contents.

Nevertheless, I still like the abandoned title. But it was actually my SO (Spousal Overunit), Kay, who suggested reviving it as the title for this blog. She did more than suggest it — she designed the whole look of this webpage around it, so that by the time she was done I couldn’t possibly say no!

One more thing that I should make clear is that I am not a planetary scientist myself. I am a science journalist with an interest in planetary science. I did a lot of reading and research when writing The Big Splat, so I do feel I am pretty well informed on the subject of the moon — but there is a very good chance that some of you will know more than I do about some aspect of space exploration or space science. That’s great! I hope you will share your knowledge with all of us, myself as well as the other readers. Please just keep your comments civil (no flame wars, please).