Samuel Arbesman, in an effort to diagram and present our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy in a way that non-scientists could grasp in terms of relationships and space, came up with a nifty graphic tool. He diagramed the Milky Way by using a convention Subway Transit map as a model. It's pretty cool; click here to read more. Click the image for a larger view with information about scale and the color-coding.
When a friend recently directed me to LunarLand.com, a website that supposedly attempts to sell real estate on Earth's moon to terrestrial people in exchange for actual legal tender, I went through a few different stages of analysis and acceptance. At first I was a little offended that something so obviously absurd exists on the Internet and probably profits, then I registered some surprise at how clean and professional the site actually is. I mean, I expect something as silly as Lunar Land to be wrought with misspellings, all-caps text and many a broken table. The fact that it looks like a respectable website is actually a bit startling. At the next stage I came to my senses and assumed that the whole thing is an elaborate joke, a satire of Internet scams and corporate greed. Then I decided to read a little deeper, even into the often overlooked Terms of Service and I came to a bizarre, worrying conclusion: Lunar Land is not only real, it's actually legitimate and kind of ingenious.
The second full moon
in a single month is a fairly rare occurence, rare enough that it's called a blue moon. A blue moon occurs every 2.7 years because our twelve month calendar doesn't quite match the lunar cycle or the time it takes for the moon to revolve around the Earth. A lunar cycle takes 29 days, 12 hours, and 44 minutes. Roughly. I should note that the moon doesn't, unfortunately, turn even slightly blue, but it's still an additional opportunity to view a full moon.New Year's eve this year is a blue moon; we've already had one on December 2. But it's even more nifty than that. First, while a blue moon occurs about every 2 and a half years, we haven't had one on New Year's Eve since 1990.
From the original YouTube post:
The snowman is 10 µm across, 1/5th the width of a human hair.
Watching the skies is just part of the day, and night for some people. I am one of them. The first thing I do every morning is go outside and look up at the sky. The last thing I do before going to bed, each night, is to watch the sky for awhile. Sometimes, I even lay in bed and just look up through the window until it is morning. When I am not outside looking at the sky, often with a camera in my hand, I check in with my favorite websites to catch up on space weather and the new photos of sky watchers around the world.
The sky is always changing, revealing itself in glimpses. I think that is why I find it so fascinating. Space is a mystery we will never stop discovering and its interaction with our earth's atmosphere create some of the most spectacular sights we will ever witness.
Additionally, there is no explaination for this seemingly supernatural formation. Witnessed by millions in Moscow who braced themselves for a close encounter, scientists and officials are saying that it is some kind of optical illusion. The halo can only be explained away as an anomoly of clouds due to a combination of differing air temperatures.
Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered that there is an enormous ring outside of all of the other rings around Saturn. The ring is composed of widely diffused particles of dust and ice. The orbital Spitzer telescope, which "sees" in infrared, enabled scientists to spot the glow of the cooler dust against the warmer matter surrounding it. The ring really is absolutely ginormous; astronomer Anne Verbiscer from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville compares it to the size of Earth's moon. "If you could see the ring, it would span the width of two full moons' worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn." Verbiscer and her colleague at the University of Charlottesville, Michael Skrutskie are co-authors of a paper in the journal Nature.
