He recalls standing in his backyard with a beer, gazing up at the moon and thinking how surreal it seemed that just a week earlier he had been there. Dave Scott, the commander of Apollo 15, once told me of the welcome-home barbecue his neighborhood threw him when he returned from the moon in 1971. There’s no telling if Borman will be watching tonight or tomorrow, but not every astronaut who orbited or touched the moon returned to Earth as unmoved as he did. The best viewing then, is away from tall buildings or stands of trees, in open country or on relatively clear land. Given the season and the tilt of the Earth, the Strawberry Moon will never climb terribly high in the sky, rising a maximum of 23 degrees above the horizon on Wednesday morning-or about a quarter of the way above ground level. Whatever it’s called, the latest supermoon will be at its closest, fullest, and brightest at 7:24 PM ET tonight. The moniker “Strawberry Moon” is instead a linguistic gift from the Algonquin Native American tribe, who named the supermoon that occurs in June after the brief strawberry harvesting season that happens at the same time of year. A Strawberry Moon, meanwhile, will be the same color as the moon ordinarily appears only its size and luminosity will change. This occurs because the Earth’s atmosphere scatters blue wavelengths of sunlight streaming through it, allowing only red to pass through, which turns the moon a faint scarlet. The popular Blood Moons happen during a lunar eclipse-when the Earth moves between the moon and the sun-and the moon does appear reddish. The new Strawberry Moon does not get its name from the color the moon will appear to be. There is a full moon every month, of course, but supermoons are rarer, happening three to four times a year, from May to August. And when that perigee happens to coincide with a full moon, as it does today, that’s when you get the dazzling phenomenon known as a supermoon. At its closest approach, or perigee, the moon appears 30% larger and 17% brighter than it usually does. Irregular and egg-shaped, it can be as far as 406,000 km (252,000 mi) from Earth and as close as 357,000 km (222,000 mi).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |