Montana Skies: Earth's spectacular moon

There's a glorious big bright moon out tonight, just rising in the eastern sky, among the stars of Taurus the bull.

Over the next few nights, the moon will move lower and lower, until it leaves the evening sky completely. You may not realize it, but our moon is a strange object, a bizarre object, a weird aberration in our solar system. Think: Does Mercury have a moon? No! Does Venus have a moon? No way! Does Mars have a moon? Yes, Mars has two moons, but they're totally different than ours. Check this out:

Those are Phobos and Deimos, the two tiny little lumpy pathetic potato-shaped loser moons. Phobos is about 14 miles in diameter, and Deimos is about 8. Get that: It's 8 miles across and they call it a moon!  That's not a moon: It's a quick hike! Sad! You want to see a moon, just look up in our sky and see the real deal:

Blammo! Now that's what a moon looks like! Our moon is more than 2,000 miles in diameter. It is 7 million times more massive than Phobos and 50 million times more massive than Deimos. The really impressive thing is that our Moon is 27% of the Earth's diameter. There's nothing else like that in the solar system. Now there are a few bigger moons. Tonight, Jupiter is shining brightly to the upper right of our moon, and Jupiter has a moon called Ganeymede, which looks like this:

Wow!  Ganymede is over 3,000 miles in diameter, 50% larger than our moon. However, Jupiter is colossal compared to the Earth, so you'd expect it to have big moons. For a real comparison, consider that Ganymede is less than 4% of the diameter of Jupiter. Our moon is 27% the size of the Earth, which makes it a true wonder!
So check out our ginormous moon rising in the east, up in our beautiful Montana Skies!