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Blue Moon will watch our New Year celebrations & deer may visit your backyard. Take a moment to look into Nature, into Future
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How often does a full moon occur twice in a single month? Exactly once in a Blue Moon. In fact, the modern usage of the term "Blue Moon" refers to the second Full Moon in a single month. Tonight's Blue Moon will be the first since November 2001. A Blue Moon typically occurs every few years. The reason for the rarity of the Blue Moon is that the 29.53 days between full moons is just slightly shorter than the number of days in the average month. Don't, however, expect the moon to look blue tonight! The term "Blue Moon" has recently been traced to an error in a magazine article in 1946. It is possible for the Moon to appear tinged by a blue hue, sometimes caused by fine dirt circulating in the Earth's atmosphere, possibly from a volcanic explosion. The above picture was taken not during a full moon but through a morning sky that appeared dark blue. The bright crescent is the only part directly exposed to sunlight - the rest of the Moon glows from sunlight reflected from the Earth. In this dramatic photo, however, the planet Jupiter is also visible along with its four largest moons.
On 2010 New Year eve: take a moment & look into the night sky read more »
NASA reveals secrets Moon's been holding for billions of years. Moon is not a dry, desolate place but has water!
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NASA scientists have been outlining their preliminary results after crashing two unmanned spacecraft into the Moon in a bid to detect water-ice. A rocket stage slammed into the Moon's south pole at 1231 BST (0731 EDT) Oct. 9, 2009. Another craft followed just behind, looking for signs of water in debris kicked up by the first collision.
The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water. Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. - Albert Einstein
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
Longest full solar eclipse of century turns day to night in Asia, celestial show inspiring awe & fear in millions
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The longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century was visible in a 155 miles corridor as it traveled half the globe and passed through the world's two most populous nations, India and China. The eclipse began at 5:28am local time (2358 GMT) in India and lasted up to a maximum of 6 minutes and 39 seconds when it hit the Pacific Ocean. Total eclipses are caused when the moon moves directly between the sun and the Earth, covering it completely to cast a shadow on Earth. Wednesday's was the longest since July 11, 1991, when a total eclipse lasting six minutes and 53 seconds was visible from Hawaii to South America. There will not be a longer eclipse until 2132. read more »
40 yrs ago: "we choose to go to the moon."It was hard. Now for mankind to keep Earth green, it's to be much harder
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July 20, 1969 saw the first human footsteps on the moon. John F. Kennedy remarked, "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard." Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, after he snapped the historic Earthrise photo on December 1968, said, "we came all this way to explore the moon and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa, a former U.S. Forest Service smoke jumper, took with him tree seeds from a Loblolly Pine, Sycamore, Sweet Gum, Redwood, and Douglas Fir. After Roosa's return to Earth, the original seeds were germinated by the U.S. Forest Service and the result was "moon trees." Moon trees now grow in many places. A Moon Sycamore also shades Roosa's grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
Brief History of Hubble Space Telescope - undergoing final maintenance-and-repair mission before retiring in 2014
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The $1.5 billion Hubble rocketed to space aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. It's named after Edwin Hubble, a pioneering American astronomer who furthered our understanding of other galaxies and demonstrated that the universe is continually expanding.
The Hubble's primary mirror, nearly eight feet across. A flaw in the mirror was discovered after the Hubble was in space; thanks to miscalibrated equipment, its glass had been ground slightly too finely at the edges. Though the imperfection measured just one-fiftieth of the thickness of a piece of paper, it distorted the Hubble's images. Astronauts fixed the problem in 1993.
About the size of a large school bus, the Hubble orbits at a speed of five miles per second, 353 miles above Earth. At that velocity it can cross the United States in about 10 minutes and circle the globe in an hour and a half.
NASA's spacecraft Kepler blasts off on a three-year mission in search of Earth-like planets
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NASA's Kepler spacecraft blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday on a three-year mission to find Earth's twin, a Goldilocks planet where it's neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for life to take hold.
The Delta II rocket, carrying the widest field telescope ever put in space, lifted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral at 10:49 p.m. Eastern time. The launch vehicle headed down-range, gathering speed as its three stages ignited, one after the other, passing over Antigua Island in the Caribbean and later over tracking stations in Australia before climbing into orbit.
Kepler will eventually settle down to scan tens of thousands of stars near the constellations Cygnus and Lyra in search of planets where water could exist on the surface in liquid form, a key condition for life as we know it. "We have a feeling like we're about to set sail across an ocean to discover a new world," said project manager Jim Fanson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. "It's sort of the same feeling Columbus or Magellan must have had." read more »
The junk in low Earth orbit: satellite collision highlights space pollution and rising hazard from debris
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The military tracks about 18,000 pieces of orbital debris. On Tuesday, the census of space-garbage suddenly jumped by 600, the initial estimate of the number of fragments from a stunning collision of two satellites high above Siberia.
Space is now polluted with the flotsam of a satellite-dependent civilization. The debris is increasingly a hazard for astronauts and has put crafts such as the Hubble Space Telescope and communications satellites at risk of being struck by an object moving at high speed.
The military's radar can spot objects about four inches in diameter - roughly the size of a baseball - or larger. This collision, however, may have produced many thousands of small, undetectable pieces of debris that would still carry enough kinetic punch at orbital velocities to damage or destroy a spacecraft. read more »
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