Watch the night sky change before your eyes! Turn each page and see how the clever peek-through holes in this fascinating book reveal the different phases of the Moon up above. Children will love discovering how the moon’s shape changes during the lunar cycle, while learning about the busy world of night time creatures that live under its helpful glow. Take a peek and learn about the world around you!
This was the promising description on the back of Moon: A Peek-Through Picture Book that I found in the library of Fall Creek Falls State Park in Tennessee. The book featured holes cut through the pages that were to reveal the phases of the Moon.
Opening the book, there was a crescent Moon.
Turning the page, the crescent grew wider.
But then, uh-oh, instead of showing a quarter moon, the book shows… what?
That picture looks more like the progression of an eclipse, not of the lunar phases. And the next illustration, of what ought to be a waxing gibbous phase, is even more in error, and even more like something from an eclipse. This is not how the phases of the Moon progress!
The page for the full Moon is OK, perhaps unsurprisingly.
However, further on in the book is an illustration of a Moonbow… arching just above a crescent Moon!
A Moonbow is going to be seen during or near a full Moon, when there is sufficient Moonlight to make a bow visible. The Moonbow will not be positioned close to the Moon, but rather will be seen opposite it, the way a rainbow is seen opposite the Sun.
This book, which was published in 2017, is from a big publishing house — Doubleday Books for Young Readers/randomhousekids.com. Would the publisher not have the resources to fact-check a book for kids? And the book is in a state park nature library — and Fall Creek Falls is a big, popular state park that probably has a well-qualified naturalist.
This book is supposed to be teaching children, but it is misinforming them instead. No one caught this; not the publisher, not the park. Children will not be discovering how the Moon’s shape changes during the lunar cycle. This despite the fact that the author was sufficiently interested in the subject to create the book; the (presumably well-resourced) publisher, sufficiently interested to publish the book; and the (presumably well-resourced) park, sufficiently interested to display the book.
We live in a world in which so much information is available at our fingertips — the simplest search on “phases of the Moon” reveals diagram after diagram, from sources like NASA or Griffith Observatory, showing the phases correctly (and of course there is always the option of observing the actual Moon!). Why is it that all that information abundance can so often do us so little good?
