The Moon
The Moon has been the Earths sister amidst the stars for billions of years, forming from the mass ejected by the impact of a Mars sized body named Thaea with the early Earth, 4.5 billion years ago, only 60-175 million years after the actual coalesence of the Earth from the protoplanetary disk.
Since time immemorial legends, myths, and stories of the Moon have graced every human culture. Though it is in the 2nd century CE we find the first extant stories of travel to the Moon; in Lucian's True Histories and The Wonders Beyond Thule by Antonius Diogenes. Both Greco-Roman stories written more than 1800 years before we would actually travel to the Moon as a species.
"The old Moon in the new Moon's arms"
Earthlight seen on the 25th of December 2022.
Light reflecting off of the Earth from the Sun travels to the Moon and returns to the Earth as a form of planetshine, this has 0.01% the radiance of sunlight.
Jupiter seen behind the Moon on the evening of February 22, 2022.
The Moon here is a mere 374,927 kilometers from the Earth (the observer), while the 11 pixel wide dot to the right, Jupiter, is a whopping 871,556,472 kilometers away.
For reference, the Moon only has a diameter of 3,475 kilometers, representing 0.0092% of the distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.0000039% of the distance to Jupiter.
And just for fun, Jupiter is 143,000 kilometers across, making its diameter 38% of the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
