Here’s an extract from Neil Armstrong’s biography First Man. I think that recent discoveries [thanks to the Hubble telescope, etc] have stretched the meaning of a ‘day’.

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.

Genesis 1:2 And the Earth was without form and void. And darkness was on the face of the deep.

Some five billion years ago, whirling and condensing in that darkness, was a cloud of interstellar hydrogen, four hundred degrees below zero, eight million miles from end to end. This was our solar system waiting to be born.

…………….. a hundred million years passed.

Genesis 1:3 And God said, “Let there be light. “And there was light

………at the center of that whirling cloud as a protester began to form, its gravitational pull attracting larger and larger mass—rotating faster and faster. And in that condensation and heat the Sun was born—in fire out of cold—ever smaller and ever more brilliant, ringed with those satellites that were to be its planets. Two protoplanets—the Earth and the Moon—now separate gaseous eddies mutually trapped in their gravitational pull, moving in tandem orbit around the Sun and growing more dense. Through space and time the increasing gravitation of the system drew in more and more debris, the heavier elements converging in those burning clouds to form molten cores at their centers.

Genesis 1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven ….

And more millions of years passed. The Earth and the Moon drew slowly apart, their rotation about each other gradually decreasing in the expanding universe. By now, most of the dust in the solar system had disappeared, either swept up by the planets, or condensed into solid particles of varying size—meteoroids that roamed in eccentric orbits through the vastness of space. Millions of these wandering objects showered onto these new planets, disappearing into their molten surfaces, leaving no trace of their impact,

And time passed. The Moon, being smaller than the Earth, began to cool first and its outer crust to harden. But this hardening was interrupted by gigantic asteroids colliding with the Moon and breaking through the crust, opening fissures that released seas of molten lava from within, flooding vast areas of the lunar landscape. As the molten seas flowed outward and over the torn surface they formed the plains or mares. Impact debris projecting above the flows became the mountains of the Moon.

And, with time, the crust would cool again and, as it cooled, fissures opened, wrinkles and ridges formed. And volcanic pressures under that surface raised great domes that would later collapse leaving craterlike formations when the eruptions subsided. Most of the lunar craters though were probably being formed by bombardments that had been going on from the Moon’s earliest beginnings: a continuous shower of meteoroids upon the lunar surface, some of the larger ones breaking through the crust and releasing lava from below.

Millennium upon millennium, this cosmic rain persisted. Through billions of years, meteorite debris has been collecting upon the surface of the Moon. Even the level areas caused by the lava flows are now deeply buried. Nearly every square foot of this outer layer is pitted with impact craters of its own. Seven hundred thousand years ago came perhaps the most recent large alteration of the lunar surface. A gigantic meteoroid struck the southern mountainous region, creating the Crater Tycho with an explosive force that scattered material in a radiating pattern nearly halfway around the Moon. Some of this material was driven out into space and into the Earth’s gravitational pull, penetrating our atmosphere and falling to Earth among the life on our planet at the time.

As we look back through space and time at the origin of the Moon, we may be in part contemplating our own beginnings. Were it not for the Moon and its effects on the creation of the Earth, man might not be on this planet at all, gazing into that luminescent face on countless nights, or be reaching out for it on this day.

~~~

Kuralt, who in coming years would become one of Armstrong’s favorite TV journalists his wistful human-interest stories drawn from the back roads and small towns of America, set a humanistic tone for the universal achievement unfolding that day. His essay reflected nearly perfectly how Armstrong himself felt about the Moon, its history, and its sibling relationship with the Earth.

Extract from First Man:  The Life of Neil A. Armstrong