Looking through these beautiful photos of the eclipsed moon reminds me of a problem we encountered earlier this year while creating the cover for my CD "Up and Over the Moon!". Photos of the moon are often upside-down or turned left-to-right, because of the way the camera or telescope sees and records the image. The CD cover needed to have the correct 'live' image of the moon, so I asked a friend of mine, an amateur astronomer, for his scientific opinion. I asked him if my artist's depiction of the moon seemed to be upright, or was it tilted or upside down or possibly even inverted? It turned out to be a more difficult question for him to answer than I'd anticipated...

"You have a bunny jumping over a house and casting a shadow on the face of the moon. This indicates that the bunny has jumped high enough to interpolate itself between the sun and the moon. The dimensions of the shadow suggest that the bunny would have to be approximately one-half the size of the earth, which (assuming that the bunny was mostly made of water) would render it approximately equivalent to the mass of the moon, at least on the same order of magnitude. An object of those dimensions placed somewhere in near-earth orbit would cause massive tidal disruptions on earth and the possible perturbation of the moon's orientation, explaining any apparent discrepancy between current terrestrial observations and the depiction on the CD cover. It also implies that any astronaut who happened to be there at the time would see an eclipse of the sun, caused by the occultation of a giant rabbit.

In this case, I tend to think that you could claim artistic licence. I conclude that the artwork should bother no one.

My real problem with it is that it's supposed to be a COW, for heaven's sake!" (Michael Bolton)

~b.w.