Catching the Sky

I've been told I have a love affair with the moon. And I believe it. Mars comes to its closest approach tonight, in less than an hour from now, and I'm asking my wife what she thinks the moon should be named. She suggests something Japanese. Actually I did try to take a picture of Mars tonight, during a rare break in the clouds. Results unsatisfactory. More to come later. In the meantime I've started a thread at the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today forums, asking for suggestions on naming the moon. I'd love to hear your opinion. And do I have a name for the moon? None. Not yet. A photograph I took on August 25th, probably the best I have:

From earlier tonight.

I saw the sun today after 9 days of clouds, fog and rain here in New York. I can remember longer cloudy periods, but none so intense. Those were clouds during a sunset in Greenpoint last October. The brilliant red, they tell me, is due to New York's smog. This was the same scene, more or less, later that month on Thanksgiving morning. Within twenty minutes almost all the clouds had gone. And this was the full moon the evening of the next day, as seen from Great Barrington, MA. I caught it when it was due East, which tells me that the photo was taken at 7:59 pm, though I have no other way of knowing. This happened to be the first time I ever saw Titan, the big moon of Saturn. My father-in-law got out his birdscope (magnification of 75x), and the whole family got to see Saturn's rings. It was a terrific evening all around. Great Barrington was the place where I took a 10-day solitary retreat, shortly before my wedding last year. I was new to astronomy and completely in love with ...

The recent discovery of a planet which has been [nick]named Xena, more distant and larger than Pluto, is stimulating a widespread discussion over the definition of a planet. I've suggested that Pluto should be demoted from the status of a planet, but I find that when I try to define a planet, there is no real need to demote Pluto. I'd like to describe why, but I want to emphasize two things. First I'd like to approach the problem by trying to defining "moon," which is a closely related concept. And I'd like to emphasize the question of time, namely how our categories need to accommodate not just change in our knowledge base as we explore and discover new things, but also dynamic change in the universe. Let me note right at the start that there are many terms in astronomy which express old concepts but are no longer accurate. We speak of bodies rising and setting. We say that there is a sun and that there are stars, but only in relatively recent times have we s...

This is the photo now appearing in Night Sky magazine. Venus and Jupiter are near the moon, with Jupiter closer. I took it last November 9 at dawn, from our roof in Greenpoint. I wrote very little in my observation journal: November 9, 2004 7:02 a.m. (26 minutes past sunrise) Our moon arrived at Jupiter today, so close (just half my 9x63 aperture) that no Galilean satellites were visible (they were IG/CE). Venus and Jupiter now take up almost a full length of my aperture. This is the closest that the moon will get to either planet this month (1.5 degrees perhaps). I took many photos, most from my window, and ventured for only 2 or 3 minutes onto the roof, so cold has it become. Very beautiful sight.

This fly was a resident of Great Barrington, MA when I photographed it. It lay very still for its portrait, and we wondered if it was dead, but it did fly away after a minute or two. Maybe it was on its last legs. That's the full photo. Compare with the photo below, which appears in Michael Light's coffetable book, Full Moon . That's the lunar module Challenger, sitting on the moon in December 1972, during the last of the moon missions, Apollo 17. Geologist Jack Schmitt took this picture with a 500-mm lens while almost 2 miles away from Challenger, which is about 23 feet high. The mountain in the background, the South Massif, of which we can see two white slopes rising steeply, is another 5 miles back. Even the darker embankment between Challenger and the white slopes lies nearly 4 miles behind the lunar module! The remains of Challenger are still sitting there in the Taurus-Littrow Valley, which was formed when a large meteor struck the moon nearly 4 billion years ago and ...