The rising moon

Many of us enjoy the sight of a sunset or sunrise, but only a few ever observe the actual rise or set of the moon. There are several reasons for this. First, while most people can estimate the time of the sunset or sunrise, the time for the moonrise and moonset are not very well known and also they change dramatically every day. In addition, sunsets can be seen everyday, but seeing the moon rise or set is best when it is full or almost full, which is only 3-4 days in a month.

Rising moon

In order to observe the moon rise, you will need to find out two parameters: when and where. I usually use the heavens-above site (as mentioned in the article about seeing satellites), which provides this data under the moon section. These parameters change according to the observer's location. Check out the times and the azimuth (angle) of the rising and try to get to a spot where the horizon is visible and the rising moon can be seen from its first minute. Try for a full or almost full moon and check the difference of the moon appearance in the blue or dark sky. In the photo above, the moon is very dark although it is almost a full moon. This can be seen only during the first minutes of the moon rise. Also, make sure to notice the large and orange moon. Of course, everything said about the moon rise is correct for the moon-set, so if you have a clear view to the west and not to the east, watch the moon-set.
The following video shows a very red, and a distorted moon-rise. The moon is not full, about 90% of the moon face are illuminated. The video is from 1 minute after the rise, after another five minutes the moon color changed to orange and about an hour later the moon was high enough to become white.

Moon Perigee and Apogee

Patience pays off. Six months ago I took a picture of the moon at Perigee, the closest point in its orbit to Earth. It was a full moon. Today (28-Nov-2012) it is a full moon again, but the moon is furthest away from Earth in its orbit - Apogee. The moon is indeed smaller, and in the exact ratio of the distances - about 15%. It is an experiment that I have wanted to do for a very long time and I am happy that I've completed it successfully.
The Apogee moon photo is from the moonrise which gives the orange tint to the picture. The reason for the orange moon is detailed in the following article.

Here is a photo of the two moons. It is not a matter of resizing. The same camera, same setting, same zoom were done to both photos. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Moon comparison at Perigee and Apogee

Carnival of space #277

Hi and welcome again to the Venus Transit for another carnival of space. The Transit is history at least for the next hundreds years, but there is plenty of other stuff going around so take a small break and dive into this issue.

Carnival of Space

Ray Sanders from "Dear Astronomer" has a new episode of "The Cosmic Ray Show" airing on November 27th at 7:00PM Pacific. Join Ray along with his co-host, astronomer Jerry Hilburn, and special guest, astronomer Dave Reneke as they discuss the recent solar eclipse, and take a virtual tour of the astronomical sights of the southern hemisphere. Featured musical guest is Google+ sensation, Ryan Van Sickle.

Is there a role for airships in the space age? This post from tranquility base introduces two novel ways that airships can contribute to space exploration. 

Centauri Dreams looks at Rod Hyde's ideas on laser fusion, as developed in a starship paper he wrote in the 1970s along with collaborators at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Two articles from Next Big Future:
In an interview with NPR, John Grotzinger, the principal investigator for the Mars Curiosity rover mission, indicated that the data [that they are getting from Mars Science Laboratory Sample Analysis at Mars Instruments] is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good. The announcement will be in a few weeks after more tests and confirmations are run. Curiosity can not directly detect the presence of Mars life. Curiosity can detect organics, which would be the presence of the building blocks of life on the surface of Mars. 

Information acquired by L2 this week revealed plans for a “game-changing” announcement as early as December that a new commercial space company intends to send commercial astronauts to the moon by 2020. According to the information, the effort is led by a group of high profile individuals from the aerospace industry and backed by some big money and foreign investors. The company intends to use “existing or soon to be existing launch vehicles, spacecraft, upper stages, and technologies” to start their commercial manned lunar campaign. New Space Watch identifies the company Golden Spike as the company that will have the commercial manned mission to the moon. It is registered in Colorado to Alan Stern, a former administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, and now working on the New Horizons Pluto mission at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Universe Today also relates to the new findings on Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory team has hinted that they might have some big news to share soon. But like good scientists, they are waiting until they verify their results before saying anything definitive.
Once again people are worrying that astronomical alignments will cause Eathquakes, Astroblogger analyses why the latest batch is nothing to worry about. If alignments and earthquakes aren't enough, now the largest solar flare recorded (the Carrington Event) is being attributed to a planetary alignment. But it just aint so.

Lucky Astroblogger is an Aussie so he had a great chance to view the last solar eclipse. Lucky for us, he shares his photos with us!

Pamela Hoffman from Everyday Spacer sends two articles: Attend an airshow and Watch a partial Lunar eclipse

And as a last treat watch the latest video from Amy Shira Teitel  author of VintageSpace. I already subscribed to her YouTube channel and eager to see new episodes.

That's all for this issue. Hope you all have long days and clear nights.

What Voyager is doing now

In our last article about Voyager, we discussed Voyager's last photo from space. After taking that photo which was the end of the grand tour, it seemed reasonable to shut down the mission and let the spaceships continue their eternal journey in space. However, since the spaceships' condition was still very good, most of the systems still functioning and their location was the furthest any object had arrived it seemed sensible to find a new mission for Voyager and not let it waste in space.
Every end is a new beginning and the end of the "Grand Tour" was the beginning of VIM - "Voyager Interstellar Mission". You might have heard on the news that Voyager left or is about to leave the solar system. This is not accurate and we need to first determine where the solar system ends. If our criteria for the edge of the solar system is the distance at which the sun gravity has little effect on celestial bodies, Voyager is still in the inner part of the solar system. The influence of the sun gravity reaches to a distance of about 1 light year from the sun, to the end of the Oort cloud.
A definition which is better for our purpose, is the border of the magnetic field of the sun. The sun's magnetic field moves with the sun. As it is illustrated in the diagram below, the magnetic field seems like a bullet advancing with the sun. It travels with and in front of the sun and stretches to a great distance behind it. Charged particles from the sun (a.k.a "Solar wind") travel very fast, they start to slow down when they meet other charged particles coming from space (a.k.a "Space wind"). The area where Voyager 1 is currently traveling is the place where these two "winds" meet ("wind" is used as a metaphor).

Voyager Interstellar Mission. NASA

In this diagram, the inner circle is the Solar system with its 8 planets (as we said before, there are other objects further away which orbit the sun). The Heliosphere, the sun's atmosphere, reaches beyond and behind the sun, and the Heliosheath is the area where Voyager 1 is currently traveling.
The size of the Heliosheath is unknown and it is changing constantly. The scientists hope that Voyager will be able to cross it and reach the area of the bow-shock. Voyager's energy supply (we will deal with this matter in our next article) will last for the next 10-15 years. In order to conserve energy, all unnecessary instruments were shutdown long ago, and only 5 systems are still functioning. These systems include the communication system, the magnetometer and other instruments to measure the speed and direction of charged particles.
What Voyager discovered is that particles from the sun's direction become slower and slower, and particles not from the sun's direction become more and more common (and with greater speed). This means that Voyager is getting nearer to the area where the majority of particles will not be from the sun (and only in that sense, leaving the solar system). So, it is now a race against time, to get as far as possible before all Voyager's energy is used. The current distance of Voyager 1 from the sun is 120 AU (astronomical unit - the distance from the sun to earth - 150,000,000 KM) and its speed is 3.6 AU per year. In 10 years it will reach a distance of 150 AU from the sun, and if it will still function we will learn a lot about the strange conditions at that far place. Voyager 1 is the front lab of humanity and it provides sci-fi enthusiastic some food for thought  about spaceship travels to other stars and planets.

See Voyager exact distance from earth and sun

Previous articles
Voyager - The grand tour
Voyager's last photo