What if Pink Floyd’s album was named ‘Far Side of the Moon’? Not as catchy? The big silvery orb that greets us every night might show us just one face, but the other side isn’t as mysterious or ‘dark’ as it seems. As space fans around the world celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing this month, Sony BBC Earth explores the moon’s ‘bright’ side in its 2018 show all set to première in India today, Wonders of the Moon. “That was one of the things I found interesting while filming the show,” says series producer James Van der Pool. “There is actually no ‘dark side’ to the moon. We know the whole bit about it being tidally locked, but this was a fascinating tidbit.”
Chasing supermoons
From blood moons and supermoons to total eclipses, the hour-long show tracks the lunar cycle through an entire year. Van der Pool, who is known for shows like 40 Years to the Moon (2009) and Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016), says the team specifically targeted production around the December 2017 supermoon. “Across 2017-18, there was a lot of lunar activity and public interest was spiking,” he says, adding, “We picked a time frame of a year because we wanted to track the new moon, full moon, the waxing and the waning.”
But tracking the lunar cycle wasn’t easy. “We had limited opportunities to film full moons so we ended up recording through seven of them,” he says with a laugh. They couldn’t document all of the special moons either. They caught August 2017’s total solar eclipse, December 2017’s supermoon and even January 2018’s super blue blood moon, but, “we couldn’t film the June 2018 blood moon. We had to work with astronomical photographers for that one”, says Van der Pool, explaining how the photographers also helped with filming in locations where the crew couldn’t.
Kayaking in the tides
The show not only takes a peek at the science behind the moon’s relationship with the Earth, but also how deeply the satellite is enmeshed into civilisation — illustrating it by going down the lanes of Hong Kong during the Harvest Moon Festival.
The most impressive visuals aren’t from the colourful festival, but those shot during the tides at the Bitches rocks. Off the Welsh coast in the UK, is where kayakers go adventure sporting between dangerously spiky rocks just as the tide comes in. “This is an attempt to look at the many ways in which the moon shapes lives on Earth — physically, but sometimes symbolically and culturally, too.” Van der Pool says how they“filmed a little girl in Hong Kong who impatiently waited for the harvest moon to appear. The joy and excitement on her face when it appeared and the disappointment when it disappeared behind the clouds: those moments reflect the true wonder of the moon”.
Wonders of the Moon will air today at 11 pm on Sony BBC Earth
