In Europe, the first conceptions of the moon as a physical object, of similar nature to the Earth emerged around the 1600s. Previous thought had accepted the Aristotelian conception of the heavens as a succession of perfect "crystal spheres" that rotated eternally and without variation. This influenced Christian philosophy that contrasted the perfect and orderly "celestial spheres" with the chaotic and imperfect "terrestrial spheres".

However, improvements in technology would come to contradict this. The telescope revealed that rather than a perfect sphere, the Moon was covered in craters, valleys and "seas". Even the sun was shown to have sunspots, irregular dark patches. Newton's laws of motion provided a new paradigm that used the same ideas to explain motion both in the heavens and on earth.