How far away is the moon? 🌙

Ah, the moon. Our ever-present celestial companion. You might look up at it during a harvest moon and feel like you could reach out and pluck it from the sky. Other times, it looks so distant you can barely make out its crescent shape. But how far away from the earth is the moon really?

The distance from Earth to its moon is about 238,900 miles.

That’s the length of:
2 trillion, 500 million, 7 thousand, 192 bananas 🍌
840 million, 928 thousand, 26 house cats 🐱
356 million, 157 thousand, 742 average-height 5-year-olds 👧
60 million, 66 thousand, 286 Asian elephants 🐘
15 million, 382 thousand, 829 blue whales 🐋
3 million, 503 thousand, 866 football fields 🏈
30 Earths! 🌎

It takes a modern spacecraft moving at more than six thousand miles/hour to make the trip in 3 days!

The first manned trip to the moon, Apollo 11, took just over three days to get from Kennedy Space Center to the lunar surface – and that was using technology from 1969. The device you are reading this on has many many times more computing power than the computers that took humans to the moon! 😲

Source: NASA

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