From The Planets by Dava Sobel:

LUNACY

During the glory days of the Apollo project, a young astronomer who analyzed Moon rocks at a university laboratory fell in love with my friend Carolyn, and risked his job and the national security to give her a quantum of Moon dust.

"Where is it? Let me see!" I demanded at this news. But she answered quietly, "I ate it." After a pause she added, "There was so little." As though that explained everything.

I was furious. In an instant I had dropped from the giddy height of discovering the Moon right there in Carolyn's apartment to realizing she had eaten it all without leaving a crumb for me.

In a reverie I saw the Moon dust caress Carolyn's lips like a lover's kiss. As it entered he mouth, it ignited on contact with her saliva to shoot sparks that lodged in her every cell. Crystalline and alien, it illuminated her body's dark recesses like pixie powder, thrumming the senseless tune of a wind chime through her veins. By its sacred presence it changed her very nature: Carolyn, the Moon Goddess. She had mated herself to the Moon somehow via this act of incorporation, and that was what made me so jealous.

Of course I had heard the old wives' tales advising women to open their bedroom curtains and sleep in the Moonlight for heightened fertility or a more regular menstrual cycle, but no folklore described powers to be won from the Moon by eating its dust. Carolyn's deed conjured Space Age magic, undreamed of when her mother and mine were new wives.

I still envy Carolyn her taste of the Moon. In reality I know she is married now to a veterinarian in upstate New York and has three grown children. She doesn't glow in the dark or walk on air. She has long since lost all traces of that Moon morsel, which no doubt passed through her body in the usual way. What could it have contained, anyway, to preoccupy me all these years?

A few grains of titanium and aluminum? Some helium atoms borne from the Sun on the solar wind? The shining essence of all that is unattainable? All of the above, probably, all rendered the more extraordinary for having traveled to her across 240,000 miles of interplanetary space, in the belly of a rocket ship, and hand-delivered as the love token of a handsome man. Lucky, lucky Carolyn.

The Apollo astronauts themselves did not intentionally swallow any Moon dust, though it clung to them, covered their white boots and space suits with grime, and so climbed with them back into their lunar modules. The moment they removed their bubble helmets, a smell of spent gunpowder, or of wet ashes in a fireplace assailed them. It was the Moon dust, tamely burning in the oxygen atmosphere the men had carried from home. Outside on the airless lunar surface, did the trodden dust give off any odor of its own? Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound if no one hears?

The astronauts judged the dusty surface of the Moon a shade of tan, like beach sand, when they looked at it facing Sunward, but said it turned gray when they turned the other way-and black when they scooped dust samples into plastic bags. The unearthly glare of unfiltered Sunlight bedeviled their color and depth perception, and that of their photographic film as well. Similarly attuned to the light of Earth's atmosphere, the film found its own interpretation of the new landscape's subtle hues and stark relief, so that in the end the men's pictures betrayed their color memories of walking on the Moon.

The view of the Moon from Earth is no less fooled by tricks of light. How else could the Moon derive its silvery gleam from dust and rocks dark as soot? The dusky markings that draw the face of the Man in the Moon reflect only 5 to 10 percent of the Sunlight that falls on them, and the brighter lunar highlands no more than 12 to 18 percent, making the Moon overall about as shiny as an asphalt roadway. But the rough-hewn lunar surface, sprinkled with ragged particles of Moon dust, multiplies the myriad planes where light may strike and ricochet. Thus the tan, gray, black dust clothes the Moon in white radiance. And seen against the somber backdrop of the night sky, the Moon appears whiter still.

Whiteness defines our image of the Moon, except for those occasions when it hangs golden on the horizon, burnished by added thicknesses of air, or dips into Earth's shadow and glows red in total lunar eclipse. No one ever seriously believed the Moon looked green in color, only that it resembled a green cheese-a whitish, splotchy wheel of newmade curds, not yet ripe for eating. True, the Moon may turn blue after a volcano sullies Earth's atmosphere, or be called blue when it becomes full more than once per calendar month, but the reliable whiteness of the ordinary Moon is what grants the idiomatic Blue Moon its air of rarity.

While white light bouncing off the Moon contains every color, Moonshine perceived on Earth mischievously bleeds familiar sights of any color. The full wattage of the full Moon dims in comparison to direct Sunlight, by a factor of 450,000, and so falls just below the retina's threshold for color vision. Even the brightest Moonlight induces pallor in each face it illuminates, and creates shadows like oubliettes, where all who enter disappear.