If the skuy be clear tonight, you'll see that the moon be full, ahr, ahr! And the clear, cold winter air provides ideal conditions for observing him whom Shakespeare, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, describes as "with lantern, dog, and bush of thorn, presenteth Moonshine". I refer, of course, to that universal friend of childhood, the mythical "man-in-the-moon".
It is well known how he got there. Once upon a time an old man went into the forest with his dog on a Sunday morning to gather sticks for firewood. When he had cut a sufficient amount he put the bundle on his shoulder and the pair trudged slowly homewards.
But there came an Angel of the Lord who said: "Do you not know that this is Sunday, when all men rest from work?"
"Sunday on Earth or Monday in Heaven - 'tis all the same to me," says the old man.
"Then," says the Angel, "since you do not keep Sunday on Earth, you shall live in a Moonday in heaven, and there you shall stay and carry your sticks until the Day of Judgment."
And the old man rose up to the moon, and on a clear night you can still see his great shadow, carrying the bundle on his shoulder with the little dog running behind him.
Readers of this column, however, will be aware that no such man-on-the-moon exists at all; what we see are variations in the moon's reflectivity caused by the craters and great mountain ranges that mark its uneven surface.
Many of these features have been named after individuals who have distinguished themselves in a variety of walks of life.
Many are named, naturally enough, after astronomers. But there are ancient heroes there, such as Caesar and Alexander, and also a dozen or so craters named after explorers (such as Vasco da Gama and Columbus), a biographer (Plutarch), a printer (Gutenberg), and a naturalist (Charles Darwin), together with a sprinkling of poets - and even an electrician (Thomas Edison).
A number of well-known meteorologists also feature on the list. Craters have been named after Anders Celsius, after Evangelista Torricelli who earned his place by inventing the barometer, and after Otto von Guericke, who improved on the Torricellian design.
Among 19th century meteorologists to have craters named in their honour were Heinrich Willelm Dove, the Prussian climatologist, and the American Matthew Fontaine Maury, who initiated formal international co-operation in the science.
And last, but by no means least, a lunar crater has been named after Thomas Romney Robinson, the director of Armagh Observatory, who invented the rotating cup anemometer for measuring wind-speed in 1846.