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In 2019, China landed its Chang'e-4 spacecraft on the moon, but the astronauts didn't just touch down in a random spot. Perhaps wondering what Pink Floyd has been fussing about, the spacecraft made its landing on the far side of the space-based body. History reported that it was "the first spacecraft in history to attempt or achieve a landing on this unexplored area, which is never visible from Earth." While there, the Chinese astronauts studied the vast moon craters on the cold surface.

There is a full moon during every single month of the year, and each one has its own unique name. From January's Wolf Moon to September's Harvest Moon and December's Cold Moon, the lunar phases have been used to keep track of each month over the course of centuries.

You may live in the Eastern Time Zone or go by Pacific Standard Time, but if you're looking to set your lunar watch, then you'll need to set it to Universal Time (UT). According to Science Focus, Universal Time "is a modern form of Greenwich Mean Time" and stays the same no matter where you are in the big, wide expanse of space. That means "the UT time on the Moon is the same as the UT time on Earth." As long as they don't have Daylight Savings Time up there, then I think we can handle it.

On a nice, clear night, a full moon seems almost close enough to touch. However, if you actually wanted to make it all the way from our planet to the lunar surface, you would have to travel between 225,623 and 252,088 miles. Struggling to conceptualize that? Well, consider the fact that NASA Science notes that when the moon is at its closest, it is the distance of 28 to 29 Earths away, and at its farthest, it is nearly 32 Earths away.

In the time since the Apollo 11 mission took place back in 1969, astronauts have abandoned plenty of items on the moon's surface. Objects like tools, other equipment, food, human waste (yes, you read that right), and over 70 "spacecraft vehicles" are still up there, according to Britannica. Why was it left behind? Well, it would apparently cost too much to bring all that rubbish back to Earth.

That beautiful sphere in the night sky is anything but perfectly round due to various factors, including impact craters and the gravity field which exists around the moon. UC Santa Cruz assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences, Ian Garrick-Bethell, wrote in a paper, via UC Santa Cruz News, "If you imagine spinning a water balloon, it will start to flatten at the poles and bulge at the equator… On top of that, you have tides due to the gravitational pull of the Earth, and that creates sort of a lemon shape."

Billions of years ago, when Earth was just a spry young thing, it came into contact with a "Mars-sized planet" called Theia. The result of this collision was that "nearly all of Earth and Theia melted and reformed as one body, with a small part of the new mass spinning off to become the Moon as we know it," according to the Natural History Museum

If you thought that quakes were limited to just our planet, then hold onto your hats because it turns out that there's a whole lotta shaking going on in space. During studies of the moon that were conducted between 1969 and 1972, Apollo astronauts installed seismometers around the locations they were exploring. According to NASA, the results showed that "moonquakes" ranged from very deep rumblings that took place about 700 km below the surface to "shallow moonquakes only 20 or 30 kilometers below the surface…that registered up to 5.5 on the Richter scale."

In order to quash a potential game of calling dibs on the moon or any planets, the United Nations signed the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, two years before astronauts first landed on the moon. Some highlights of the treaty include a determination that "the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries," and a rule that parties to the treaty are "not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction." Well, that's certainly a relief

That number may seem quite staggering at first, however, the moon doesn't produce its own light—it actually reflects the light of the sun. And not very well either. According to Sky and Telescope, "The brightness of the Moon depends on the exact angle between the Earth, Moon, and Sun…[and] the brightness of a Full Moon is usually quoted at a magnitude around -13, about 14 magnitudes or 400,000 times fainter than the Sun." That means that the moon has a lot of work to do if it wants to be as flashy as our brightest star.