Super Blue Blood Moon

Rubecula

Get out the binoculars folks tis the night of the Super Blue Blood Moon tonight (31/Jan/2018)

edit from wiki:

A Blue Moon combined with a Supermoon (when the Moon is at its closest point to Earth and appears to be 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than normal) the rare phenomena is called a Super Blue Blood Moon happens. Supermoons generally only occur once every 14 months and will not happen again until January 2019.

The last time all of these events occurred simultaneously in the Western hemisphere was 1866.

Rubecula

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/42879001/super-blue-blood-moon-get-ready-for-a-rare-celestial-show

Pat Dunne

Rubecula wrote: »

Get out the binoculars folks tis the night of the Super Blue Blood Moon tonight (31/Jan/2018)

You won't be needing Bins to see this beauty Rubecula. On my way to work this morning at about 6:45am I was lucky enough to see it in the western sky and to say it was breathtaking is an understatement.
I have witnessed a fair few "super moon" events and this is the brightest I can ever recall.
Looking forward to this evening, lets hope we get a few breaks in the cloud.

4068ac1elhodqr

'Super-Snow-Blue-Blood/Red-Hollow-Reciprocal-Lock-Moon' peak occurs at 13:26hrs.

But is hard to see between the sun, snow showers and well due to it's location currently just above Honolulu at its zenith Latitude: 17° 16' North, Longitude: 165° 08' West.
But will start to rise here again at 63o, from 5pm-ish onward.

M.T. Cranium

It is going into total eclipse here in western North America. That's where the blood part of the name originates. The blue part is because it's the second full moon of January. The super part is because it's near perigee.

You probably all knew that or most of that.

I am looking out the window at it here but cloud is invading, might have to drive around a bit. Local time is 0450 and the moon is in the west starting to set behind a mountain range so I need to get up a bit higher to keep it in view (on a different mountain range).

Think I am going to be clouded out though. Well I saw the solar eclipse, this is just a minor top-up compared to that.

ps200306

The media hype around this stuff is getting annoying. For those of us in Europe, there is no blood moon. The blue moon is not something you can see, and is about as interesting as the fact that there are five Wednesdays in January. And the supermoon is not discernible to the average punter, most people are just being fooled by the moon illusion and by the media insistence on printing pics taken from miles away with telephoto lenses like this:

jfSDAS

Have to agree on the mangling of the terminology - and don't get me started on the term "Micro Moon" (for the most distant Full Moon of the year) which some sources are using

As a few people have said, anything that gets people looking up in wonder and saying, "Isn't that beautiful." is worthwhile. My sister in San Francisco got some nice photos on her iPhone of the lunar eclipse yesterday morning. The image scale is very small but still, they all as a family got up to look out at 5:45am PST.

I really like when the western sky is clear in the morning time to see a Full Moon sinking towards the horizon. The glare of the lunar disk is much reduced yet it looms large due to the Illusion effect and allows extraordinary detail to be made out with the unaided eye.

Books like "Seeing the Sky" by Fred Schaaf or, more recently, Bob King's "Night Sky with the Naked Eye" talk about The Pickering Test which allows you gauge your visual acuity on the Full Moon's disk. More info at http://www.popastro.com/moonwatch/moon_guide/observing4.php and http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/how-to-see-lunar-craters-with-the-naked-eye102820152810/

John

Capt'n Midnight

The moon used to be a lot closer.


Probably formed somewhere between 3 and 5 earth radius away. 3 because of the Roche limit and 5 because of how far the collision could have ejected stuff.

6 hour days as the earth was spinning faster too , and whopping great tides because it was so close.

endacl

ps200306 wrote: »

The media hype around this stuff is getting annoying. For those of us in Europe, there is no blood moon. The blue moon is not something you can see, and is about as interesting as the fact that there are five Wednesdays in January. And the supermoon is not discernible to the average punter, most people are just being fooled by the moon illusion and by the media insistence on printing pics taken from miles away with telephoto lenses like this:

And there's no such thing as a 'super moon'...

Capt'n Midnight

endacl wrote: »

And there's no such thing as a 'super moon'...

Io.

Volcanoes n' stuff :cool:

4068ac1elhodqr

Some of Venice's famous canals have dried up due to the super-ish moon and low rainfall.
Someone said today "Where's the water GON-DALA?"

Rubecula

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

The moon used to be a lot closer.


Probably formed somewhere between 3 and 5 earth radius away. 3 because of the Roche limit and 5 because of how far the collision could have ejected stuff.

6 hour days as the earth was spinning faster too , and whopping great tides because it was so close.

Would the Earth have had liquid water so soon after the collision?

Capt'n Midnight

Rubecula wrote: »

Would the Earth have had liquid water so soon after the collision?

Earth 4.4 billion years ago was flat and almost entirely covered in water with just a few small islands, new research suggests.

“Our research indicates there were no mountains and continental collisions during Earth’s first 700 million years or more of existence – it was a much more quiet and dull place,” he says. “There are strong similarities with zircon from the types of rocks that predominated for the following 1.5 billion years, suggesting that it took the Earth a long time to evolve into the planet that we know today.”

Of course the thing is that tidal range depends on local geography too

ps200306

There could have been 700 million years between the formation of the Moon and the formation of Earth's oceans. The literature isn't very consistent on this. The surface would certainly have been molten after the hypothesised giant impact that formed the Moon, and too hot for liquid water. It's suggested that it could have taken until 3.8 billion years ago for the temperature to fall to where the oceans could form. The Moon would have done a lot of its receding in those early stages, as the rate of tidal acceleration is greater when the moon is closer. And you don't need oceans to get tidal acceleration as there are body tides too, especially with a molten earth.

It probably is true that when the oceans formed, there was very little land. Today's continents are made out of less dense material that has gradually been fractionated out of the mantle and is floating above it. It's interesting to think what would happen if we had another giant collision. The surface would melt again and the continents disappear into it, but it probably wouldn't take as long for them to re-emerge this time as the lighter fractions would still be separate. Pristine land would soon be in plentiful supply and the demand for housing would be much reduced. I suspect this forms the core of the present government's housing strategy as it shows every sign of needing billions of years to come to fruition.