--- title: The Moon, the planets and the stars — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The Moon, the planets and the stars», a lesson of the myths course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A film voice booms: "The DARK side of the Moon, where sunlight never falls..." Spooky music, a cold black world. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Myths](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/) / The Moon, the planets and the stars # The Moon, the planets and the stars Lesson 14 of the myths course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/0/) — A film voice booms: "The DARK side of the Moon, where sunlight never falls..." Spooky music, a cold black world. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/1/) — It's a wonderful shiver, and completely wrong. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/2/) — The Moon always shows us the same face, so the other side was "dark" in the old sense: unknown. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/4/) — The night sky is full of myths like that, because we see everything from very far away: shooting stars that look like falling stars, the famous North Star that must be the brightest, Mercury that must be the hottest. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/5/) — Each sensible guess can be checked: shooting stars are space pebbles burning in our air, Sirius outshines Polaris, and Venus is hotter than Mercury because its thick air traps the heat. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/6/) — And you can enjoy the stories while knowing the science: make a wish on a shooting star, read your horoscope for fun, and still know which is astronomy. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/7/) — The far side of the Moon gets as much sunlight as the near side; "dark" meant unknown, and the far side was first photographed by the Soviet Luna 3 in 1959. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/8/) — Shooting stars are tiny bits of space rock and dust burning up in our air; real stars are enormous and very far away. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/9/) — Polaris, the North Star, is not the brightest star; Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, and Polaris is useful because it stays almost still above the North Pole. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/10/) — Venus is the hottest planet, around 465 °C, because its thick air traps heat; Mercury has almost no air, so its night side gets very cold. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/11/) — In 2006 astronomers reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet after finding other similar objects, and some scientists still argue about it. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/12/) — The Moon makes no light of its own; it reflects sunlight, and its phases come from how much of its lit half we can see. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/13/) — Stars twinkle because their light is bent by moving air in our atmosphere; seen from space, they don't twinkle. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/14/) — The Moon looks bigger near the horizon, but a photo or a coin at arm's length shows it's the same size; scientists still debate exactly why our brains see it so. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/15/) — Saturn is not the only planet with rings: Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune have faint rings too. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/16/) — Astronomy is the science of space; astrology is a belief about stars and personality, and tests haven't shown it predicts anything. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/14-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-stars/17/) — A black hole's pull, from far away, is the same as any object of the same mass, so only things that come very close fall in; if the Sun became a black hole of the same mass, the Earth's orbit would not change. - ← previous: [Earth from space](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/13-earth-from-space/) - next →: [Weather, lightning and storms](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/15-weather-lightning-and-storms/) - ↑ back to [Myths](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/myths/)