The stars might be too far away to dream of visiting, but the moon is so close. It's right up there in the sky, almost every night. It's taunting us as it twirls around the Earth in its near-monthly rotation. Even as NASA and others turn their attention towards Mars, the moon is still something many of us dream of. And even though most of us will never reach it, we'll continue to reach for it every day... as the wallpaper on our phone.
It's been a while since I featured a Trey Ratcliff, and I don't know why, because his work is always out of this world. Winter may not be here yet, but it's never too early to imagine some majestic snow-capped mountains, with a magic moon setting behind a pierced shroud of pale clouds....
Golden moons are magical things... well, they may be slightly less magical than childhood films like The Swan Princess led me to believe, but the golden glow of a harvest moon just seems more powerful, more awe-inducing. The definition of the ripples on the lake in this distance shot are spectacular, and if they have me humming Far Longer Than Forever, oh darn.
While full moons may seem more wholesome and powerful, crescent moons are full of promise, full of mystery, full of secrets. They're knife-thin Cheshire cat grins in the sky, waiting for a pair of bright eyes to blink into view above them. This wallpaper also helps put back into perspective how small the moon looks compared to our beautiful Earth thanks to this shot from Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata.
Crescent Moon Rising and Earth's Atmosphere by Koichi Wakata
Good night, Moon by Scott Kelly
Astronaut Scott Kelly got to spend a year on the International Space Station, which is something for which millions of nerds will forever envy him, and in that year of living in a weightless lab orbiting our blue marble, he had a lot of time to take freaking gorgeous pictures. Pictures like these! The Earth looks like a baby blue blanket getting ready to smother the moon, which is just out of its reach...
Three times the crescent moons, three times the mystery, three times the magic... it's a shame this is all the way out on Saturn. Saturn has many, many moons, but here we have Titan, with its gaseous glow, rough Rhea with its icy craters, and mini Mimas at the bottom. Look at mini Mimas, it's such a cute little moon! This wallpaper comes from the Cassini spacecraft, an unmanned spacecraft sent into Saturn's orbit.
