Archive Gallery: Mankind's Eternal Fascination With the Mysterious Moon
March 1924 What's on the moon? Here are the "midget-sun hypothesis," lunar snow, and more wild speculations we made prior to the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 Few things have inspired as much mythology and mystique as the moon. We've credited it with triggering madness, housing deities and rousing werewolves. Even after the age of Enlightenment, astronomers hyped up the moon so much, that the more we found out about it, the more unglamorous it became. By the time Popular Science came around, most astronomers were fairly certain that the moon was dead. In fact, by 1887, we declared the moon a "frozen and dried-up globe, a mere planetary skeleton, that could no more support life than the Humboldt glacier could grow roses." Click to launch the photo gallery. There's only so much you can figure out about the moon with a telescope, though. Between the late 19th century and the mid-1950's,...