Tag Archives: Moon

A Minimal Penumbral Lunar Eclipse and Two “Meteorocre” Shooting Star Displays

“What’s in a name? That which we call a July Full Moon
By many other names would shine as bright.”

My apologies to William Shakespeare, but I simply couldn’t resist mangling the above famous quote from Romeo and Juliet.

Full Moons have a myriad of names. Here in the United States the colonists adopted many of them from Native Americans, predominantly the eastern Algonquin nation. While these descriptive names have become the primary ones by which we identify each Full Moon, many other names have been ascribed to them.

For example, the July Full Moon is usually called the Full Buck Moon. This name was one brought over by the colonists from Europe. Male deer in both Europe and North and South America shed their antlers yearly, and by July a new set has emerged. Another old-world name for this Full Moon is Hay Moon, signaling when the hay field had been reaped. And finally Thunder Moon has been used for obvious reasons during northern hemisphere summer months.

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Geminid Meteor Shower Mooned Out and Other Celestial Offerings

As quickly as it started, 2019 will soon be in the history books. I for one am happy to see it go. A cloudy and rainy spring, hot and humid heat waves during the summer, then the EEE mosquito threat have conspired to prevent casual stargazers and amateur astronomers alike from enjoying the night sky and all the wonders it holds. It would be great if we could end the year on a high note, but the sky gods are not smiling down on us for December.

Though the Geminids are the best meteor shower of the year, peaking on the night of December 13-14, the Full Moon on the 12th will overwhelm all but the brightest meteors. To complicate matters further on the peak night, that bright moon will be sitting right in the middle of the Gemini constellation. While you won’t require my usual star map to find Gemini, the proximity of the Moon to the region of the sky from where the meteors appear to radiate (near Gemini’s brightest stars, Castor and Pollux), will certainly reduce your meteor count. .

However, one does not have to look directly at Gemini to catch a few of the brightest shooting stars. In fact, the Geminids are fairly bright and also have a reputation for producing exploding meteors called fireballs, My point: if the weather cooperates on peak night do not give up on the Geminids. You might just glimpse a few bright Geminids as they enter our atmosphere at 21.75 miles per second.

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A Meteor Shower, a Blue Moon, and No More Iridium Flares


May Meteor Shower

   It’s challenging to explain to someone that you spent a below-freezing December night sitting on your back porch bundled up in a sleeping bag on a lounge chair just to watch a few meteors blaze across the sky. Why? Because sometimes even I question why I choose to do so. A few months back the Geminid meteor shower did not perform well around here, at least not when I decided to observe it. After about an hour and a half I counted less than a dozen meteors, and not all of them were Geminids. Only a couple of them were bright enough to elicit a wow, though not loud enough to wake my neighbors!

    That’s the way it is with meteor showers. Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time to see the meteors to best advantage. Other times you are not. It can be frustrating when the latter occurs, especially when the weather conspires against you. Still, after all my decades of stargazing I never tire of watching for meteors to fall from the sky.

    The early days of May present us with warmer weather prospects to enjoy a somewhat “meteor-ocre” display of shooting stars. During the pre-dawn hours of May 5 and 6, the Earth will be sweeping through a stream of particles shed by Halley’s Comet long ago. (Either morning will be a fine time to observe since the Eta Aquarids do not have a sharp peak. The meteors comprising this meteor shower enter the Earth’s upper atmosphere head-on at 41 miles per second. While the Moon will not interfere with observing this shooting star display this year (New Moon is on the 4th), one can expect to see no more than 10-15 swift and yellow shooting stars per hour from Southern New England. Why? The Eta Aquarids, are best observed from the southern hemisphere.

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“An Astronomical Blunder”

“An Astronomical Blunder. — Professor Waltemath of Hamburg recently announced through a private circular that he had discovered a second moon to our earth. The contents of the circular were the basis of sensational articles in leading newspapers… He also quotes descriptions of strange objects in the sky seen at various times since the sixteenth century, which his calculations show were probably this second moon.”

The Cyclopedic Review of Current History, 1898.

Georg Waltemath
“Dr. George [sic] Waltemath. The German astronomer, who says he has discovered a second moon circling around the earth.” – Chicago Daily Tribune, March 22, 1898.
Georg Waltemath made an extraordinary claim: that the Earth had a second moon. It was supposed that it was much smaller and dimmer than the known moon. He calculated that this object orbited the Earth every 119 days and would pass between the Earth and Sun, on average, every 177 days. He predicted that on February 3rd of 1898 it would be visible in silhouette as it moved across the disk of the Sun, an event known as an astronomical transit.

Winslow Upton was skeptical of the existence of this long unnoticed moon, but nonetheless attempted to observe it.

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The dark side of the Moon

Automated instruments on the roof of Ladd Observatory monitored the sky during the total lunar eclipse of Sept. 27-28, 2015. First there is a wide field sky camera. It has a fish-eye lens which can capture an image of most of the sky above Providence. The second is a sky brightness meter which is used to monitor light pollution.

Eclipse sky
An image from the sky camera during the total phase of the eclipse. (Click on the image to see a time lapse video.)

The full Moon is usually so bright that it overwhelms the sensitive camera causing the images to be overexposed. During the eclipse the Moon was dark enough that the only artifact in the image above is a thin vertical line where one column of the digital camera was saturated by the moonlight. The camera is more sensitive than the human eye allowing the Milky Way to be seen during the total phase of the eclipse. The time lapse video contains 3,625 still images. Each second of the movie shows about 5 minutes of changes in the sky.

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