The Moon doesn’t look as if it is very far away, but its distance from the Earth is
about 239,000 miles. It is this great distance that explains why the Moon seems to
follow us when we drive in a car and look up at it.
To begin with, our feeling that this is happening is just that, only a feeling, a
psychological reaction. When we speed along a road, we notice that everything
moves past us. Trees, houses, fences, the road – they all fly past us in the opposite
direction. But when we look at the Moon we naturally expect it also to be flying past
us, or at least to be moving backwards as we speed ahead. When this doesn’t
happen, we have the sensation that it is following us.
In fact we could go along a straight path for miles and the angle at which we would see the Moon basically be the same.
