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The far side... of the Moon

The Museum of the Moon exhibit of a six-metre Moon at the Natural History Museum in London is both familiar and jarring.
Published in Astronomy
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May Chiao
Chief Editor, Nature Astronomy
The far side... of the Moon
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Wow. Last night I was at the opening of the Museum of the Moon exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London. It wasn't so much that I was seeing the Moon in a different light (the lighting inside the gallery was really natural, by the way) but I found it slightly disturbing on that scale -- almost supernatural. NASA's images are truly mind-blowing.

It turns out that the artist, Luke Jerram, had wanted to make such a large-scale Moon for twenty years, but the technology has only just caught up with his vision. His upbringing in Bristol, where the Severn rises and falls by up to 15 m, brought an awareness of our deep relationship with the Moon. He has been touring the world with his model of the Moon, from churches to museums. See it now, for free, at the Natural History Museum (until 1 January 2020): https://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/exhibitions/museum-of-the-moon.html

Go to the profile of May Chiao
May Chiao
Chief Editor, Nature Astronomy
May started as a locum editor at Nature in 2003, and then joined the launch team of Nature Physics, handling a range of topics in the physical sciences. In 2016, she became Chief Editor of Nature Astronomy, which launched in 2017. May holds a physics degree from the University of British Columbia, and was a budding radio astronomer at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Ottawa. She changed course as a PhD student at McGill University, where she specialised in superconductivity. For her postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, she further branched into quantum matter under extreme temperature, pressure and magnetic fields. As an editor she enjoys learning new things everyday.

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Astronomy, Cosmology and Space Sciences
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