Diana or Luna

Diana, or Luna, Roman goddess of the Moon, animals, and hunting (earth’s moon).

Luna gives us “lunar” from Latin lucere, to shine.
Symbol: a crescent Moon.

• Called Luna by the Romans, Selene and Artemis by the Greeks, and many other names in other mythologies.
• The twin sister of Apollo was Artemis; also known as Diana, Phoebe, Selene, or Cynthia; goddess of the Moon, of maidens, of hunting (the chase), and daughter of Zeus and Latona.
• In works of art, this goddess is generally represented as a beautiful maiden, clad in a short hunting dress, armed with a bow, a quiver full of arrows at her side, and a crescent on her well-poised head.
• The sudden deaths of women were attributed to her shafts; but, she was, also, a goddess of healing.
• She was often represented as a huntress, with hunting dogs and a boar’s head at her side.
• Diana is described as guiding her silvery chariot over the sky at night.
• She had three aspects: Diana in the heavens, Luna on earth, and Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, in the underworld.



A few scientific facts about the Moon and the Earth

• Moon and Earth, tied together by gravitational attraction, revolve as a double planet.
• Total eclipses occur when the Moon and Earth line up perfectly with the Sun.
• During a solar eclipse, the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, hiding the Sun on a small area of Earth.
• During a lunar eclipse, the full Moon moves into Earth’s shadow and is blacked out.
• Because Earth spins faster than the Moon revolves, the Moon rises an average of 50 minutes later each night.
• During the new phase, Moon and Sun rise and set at the same time; but, from then on, the Moon appears in different parts of the sky: in the west as it waxes larger towards gibbous, in the east as it wanes smaller.
• The gravitational force of the Moon, and to a lesser extent the Sun, raises the ocean tides on Earth.
• A great bulge of water is pulled up on the side of the Earth facing the Moon and held there.
• As Earth rotates beneath the bulge, high tides occur and then because of Earth’s rotation, the tide seems to move from east to west.
• None of the other planets has a moon like the Earth. Mercury and Venus have no moons at all, and Mars is orbited only by two tiny chunks of rock, each just one ten-millionth the size of Earth’s moon.
• Because the Moon rotates on its axis in exactly the time it takes to orbit the Earth, it always presents the same side to us.
• The Moon does not emit light. What we see is sunlight reflected from the Moon’s surface as the Moon goes through its familiar phases.

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