Astronomy

Election Day Blood Moon Eclipse

Tuesday, November 7, a total lunar eclipse will be visible in North America, Central America, Colombia, and western Venezuela and Peru. It’ll begin just before sunrise and will last about an hour and a half.

From the NPR article below:

The phenomenon causes the moon to appear red, often nicknamed a “blood moon.” During a lunar eclipse, what little sunlight that’s left passes through Earth’s atmosphere to get to the moon. The more cloudy or dusty the atmosphere is, the redder the moon looks.

“It’s as if all the world’s sunrises and sunsets are projected onto the Moon,” NASA said.

A total lunar eclipse is happening Tuesday — and it won’t happen again for 3 years

NPR

Nov. 7, 2022

Ayana Archie

A total lunar eclipse is happening Tuesday, and it might be a good time to catch a peek, because the next one isn’t for three years.

The initial phase of the eclipse begins at 3:02 a.m. ET, according to NASA. The partial eclipse then begins at 4:09 a.m. ET, when to the naked eye, it looks like a bite is being taken out of the moon. The lunar disk enters totality at 5:17 a.m. ET and will last for about an hour and a half.

People in North America, Central America, Colombia, and western Venezuela and Peru will be able to see the eclipse in totality. Those in Alaska and Hawaii will be able to see all stages of the eclipse.

For the best view, it is best to be in a dark area with little light pollution.

A lunar eclipse happens when the sun, Earth and moon align. During a full lunar eclipse, the moon falls completely in the Earth’s shadow.

The phenomenon causes the moon to appear red, often nicknamed a “blood moon.” During a lunar eclipse, what little sunlight that’s left passes through Earth’s atmosphere to get to the moon. The more cloudy or dusty the atmosphere is, the redder the moon looks.

“It’s as if all the world’s sunrises and sunsets are projected onto the Moon,” NASA said.

The next full lunar eclipse will occur on March 14, 2025, but there will be partial lunar eclipses before then, according to NASA.

Buck Supermoon this Wednesday, July 13

This Wednesday the moon will be at its closest point to the Earth for the year–the “Buck Supermoon.”  More info below from Space.com.  

Don’t Miss the Biggest ‘Supermoon’ of the Year on July 13

On Wednesday (July 13), the moon will arrive at its closest point to the Earth for 2022.

 

A supermoon in the dusk sky. (Image credit: Getty)

 
By Joe Rao
Space.com

On Wednesday (July 13) at 5 a.m. EDT (09:00 GMT), the moon will arrive at its closest point to the Earth for 2022: a perigee distance of 221,994 miles (357,264 kilometers) away. 

Nine hours and 38 minutes later, the moon will officially turn full. Though full moon theoretically lasts just a moment, that moment is imperceptible to ordinary observation, and for a day or so before and after most will speak of seeing the nearly full moon as “full”: The shaded strip is so narrow, and changing in apparent width so slowly, that it is hard for the naked eye to tell whether it’s present or which side it is on.  

So, when the moon shines down on your neighborhood on Wednesday night, keep this in mind: What you’re looking at is not precisely a full moon, but a waning gibbous moon, already many hours past its stage of full illumination. . . .

 

Favorite Astronomy Poems No. 3: “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”

English majors will likely remember No. 3 in our favorite astronomy poems, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” by Walt Whitman.

Here’s a picture of the old scallawag:

walt-whitman

Not as pretty as Audrey Hepburn, but a fine writer. He only had formal schooling up until the age of eleven, after which he supported himself with printing and journalism. He made his name as a poet with “Leaves of Grass,” a collection of poems he self-published at age 36, winning praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson, although others condemned his writing for being obscene.

He described himself thusly: “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.”

Little known fact: some say Walt Whitman was the original model for “Dracula” in the novel of the same name by Bram Stoker, a long-time admirer of his.

Here’s the poem, from 1865:

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired, and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Comet ISON Update

David Eicher, editor of Astronomy magazine, gives this clear-eyed update on Comet ISON, the latest “Comet of the Century.”

His prognosis: It’s still too early to tell exactly how spectacular Comet ISON will be, but rest assured that it’ll be bright, a “naked-eye comet from mid-November through year’s end.”

Here’s a nice view of Comet ISON from the Hubble telescope, April 10, 2013:

Comet Ison from Hubble, 4:10:13

Songs with Astronomical Themes No. 7: “The Planets” by Gustav Holst

No. 7 in our Songs with Astronomical Themes isn’t a song but an orchestral suite, “The Planets,” by composer Gustav Holst (1874-1934). This selection is the seventh and last movement, “Neptune, the Mystic.”

Here’s a picture of Gustav:

holst

Despite his name, he was an Englishman. He came from a very musical family; his great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and wife were all musicians.

(Gustav’s brother Emil, however, moved to America, changed his name to Earnest Cossart, and became an actor. He appeared often as a butler in Hollywood films of the 30s. In 1942, Earnest acted alongside Ronald Reagan in “Kings Row,” the film in which Reagan’s character wakes up from surgery to find both his legs amputated and cries, “Where’s the rest of me?!”–a line that Reagan later used as the title of his autobiography.)

Okay, back to Gustav. As a boy he suffered from asthma, poor eyesight, and neuritis in his arms that made playing the piano difficult for him. His mother introduced him to Theosophy, which is how he became interested in mysticism, Eastern religions, and astrology.

In college he studied Sanskrit, and during his “Indian Period” he set a number of his works to Sanskrit texts.

“The Planets,” begun when Gustav was 40 years old, is based on astrology, not astronomy; the seven movements correspond to the seven planets used in astrology (Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune).

Although Holst didn’t think the composition was one of his best, it became instantly popular and won him lasting fame.

Here’s an album cover from a 1970s recording of “The Planets”:

theplanetsbizarrecover-500x500

The movement here, “Neptune, the Mystic,” has a definite mystical sound to it, especially with the ethereal women’s choir that comes in about halfway through. In fact, to anyone who’s ever seen any film or TV show that deals with space or science-fiction, this movement is likely to sound awfully familiar. If the piece isn’t quoted exactly, it’s certainly imitated, so much so that when we try to imagine what “space” sounds like now, I believe we unconsciously think of Holst’s “Neptune.”

“Neptune” was one of the first pieces of orchestral music to have a “fade out” ending, and I’ve always loved Holst’s instructions for how performers are to achieve this effect:

The women’s chorus, he writes, is to be “placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed.”

So here it is, Gustav Holst’s “Neptune, the Mystic,” from “The Planets”:

Songs with Astronomical Themes No. 6: Blue Moon, Sung by Elvis

In honor of our own blue moon this week, here’s No. 6 in our Songs with Astronomical Themes series: “Blue Moon.”

Blue Moon Sheet Music
The song was written by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, the duo that wrote dozens of Broadway musicals and hundreds of popular songs. “Blue Moon” went through several incarnations, with different titles and lyrics, before this version was written and recorded in 1935.

Elvis Presley’s rendition, released by Sun Records in 1954, is one of my favorites. Have a listen. It borders on the bizarre, with the clop-clopping electric guitar, the over-the-top reverb, and and Elvis’s weird falsetto cooing at the end of each verse.

A blue moon, by the way, as in “once in a blue moon,” is an extra full moon in a season–commonly, the second full moon in a single month. So it’s a rare event, occurring every two or three years. A blue moon, however, is rarely blue.

The Minor Planets: Who Knew There Were So Many?

At first I thought this simplified illustration of the solar system was whimsical and interesting, but hardly accurate. That band of “Minor Planets” between Jupiter and Mars–that couldn’t be right, could it?

Odd Solar System Drawing

Ah, but it’s true. Hundreds of thousands of minor planets have been discovered within the solar system and thousands more are discovered each month (from Wikipedia). That band in the diagram is more often referred to as the Asteroid Belt, but asteroids are only one class of minor planets bouncing around the Sun.

There are also Dwarf Planets, Centaurs, Trojans, and Trans-Neptunian Objects like Cubewanos and Plutinos–all “minor planets” in our solar system.

The Minor Planet Center, of the International Astronomical Union, logs the many, many minor planets as they’re discovered, along with comets.

Their Latest Published Data indicates, incredibly, 100,913,328 observed Minor Planets and 658,679 comets.

I haven’t been able to find out who the artist of that illustration is, by the way.