Archive
06/14/2022 – Ephemeris – All about tonight’s full moon
This is Bob Moler with Ephemeris for Flag Day, Tuesday, June 14th. Today the Sun will be up for 15 hours and 33 minutes, setting at 9:29, and it will rise tomorrow at 5:56. The Moon, at full today, will rise at 10:22 this evening.
The actual instant that the Moon was full, that is opposite the Sun in the sky, is 7:52 this morning. That’s why the Moon will rise nearly an hour after the Sun sets tonight. It’s also a supermoon, though I dare anyone to be able to tell it apart from any other rising full Moon, since there is nothing to compare its size too. Both the Sun and Moon appear larger than normal when seen on the horizon. The Moon’s perigee or closest point in its orbit of the Earth occurs at 7:52 this evening. This month’s full Moon is also called the Strawberry Moon by Native Americans, because this is the month that strawberries ripen. Also, the term honeymoon comes from the fact that many weddings are in June, when the full moon is low in the sky in the south and has a yellowish or honey color due to haze and atmospheric preferential scattering of blue light.
The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EDT, UT – 4 hours). They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Mini Moon (Moon at apogee) and Super Moon (moon at perigee) for 2017. Created using Cartes du Ciel (Sky Charts).
The distance of the Moon at perigee this month, at 7:21 pm June 14th is 357,400 kilometers, or 222,100 miles. The Moon reaches apogee twice this month: On the 1st at 406,200 kilometers, or 252,400 miles, and again on the 29th at 406,600 kilometers or 252,600 miles. The reason for the differences in aphelion distances, which also occur with perigee distances, is the additional gravitational influences of the Sun, Jupiter and Venus, plus all the other planets to a lesser degree.
02/15/2022 – Ephemeris – The Moon’s splashiest crater
This is Ephemeris for Tuesday, February 15th. Today the Sun will be up for 10 hours and 28 minutes, setting at 6:11, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:41. The Moon, 1 day before full, will set at 8:09 tomorrow morning.
The Moon at 8 pm tonight will be only 16 hours before being full. As down as I am about full moons due to the fact that they light up the sky and flood out the dimmer objects, I once in a while stop and view it. Being less than a day from full, we see it tonight from very nearly the direction of the Sun, so there will be few shadows to be had. The crater Tycho is near the bottom or south end of the moon and has long rays of tiny ejecta craters. The full moon is the best time to see these rays, which are easily visible in binoculars, through which Tycho itself looks like a bright dot. In telescopes, Tycho looks like a small, bright crater with a dark ring around it. The full moon is super bright. It’s daytime over there.
The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EST, UT – 5 hours). They may be different for your location.
Addendum
An image I took of the full moon in August 2016 and processed for maximum contrast to show the crater Tycho with its dark ring, near the bottom (south) of the Moon and its rays that stretch for hundreds of miles across the face of the Moon. The image is fairly low resolution, taken with a 300 mm telephoto lens. Click on the image to enlarge it a bit.
04/26/2021 – Ephemeris – There’s a full supermoon tonight
This is Ephemeris for Monday, April 26th. Today the Sun will be up for 14 hours and 2 minutes, setting at 8:41, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:38. The Moon, at full today, will rise at 8:19 this evening.
The full moon tonight is the full Pink Moon, and a supermoon. As down as I am about full moons due to the fact that they light up the sky and flood out the dimmer objects in the sky, I once in a while stop and view it. The time of the full moon is 11:31 tonight, so when it rises tonight we will be looking at the moon from very nearly the direction of the Sun, so there will be few shadows to be had. The crater Tycho is near the bottom or south end of the moon and has long rays of tiny ejecta craters. The full moon is the best time to see these rays, which are easily visible in binoculars, through which Tycho itself looks like a bright dot. In telescopes Tycho looks like a small bright crater with a dark ring around it. The full moon is super bright. It’s daytime over there.
The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler are inexorably linked in astronomical history. Tycho was famously stingy with the results of his observations. It was only after his death that Kepler was able to have access to them. Mars was the planet that was hardest to model in both the Ptolemaic geocentric and Copernican heliocentric universes, since both assumed the planetary orbits were circular. So both resorted to epicycles in an attempt to tweak their models in an attempt to fit with observational reality.
Both Tycho and Kepler have craters named for them on the Moon. Tycho gets a splashy crater on the southern part of the Moon. Kepler, however, gets a small crater on the plains of Oceanus Procellarum west of the crater Copernicus on the left side of the Moon, as we see it
01/28/2021 – Ephemeris – Checking out the full Moon in binoculars
This is Bob Moler with Ephemeris for Thursday, January 28th. Today the Sun will be up for 9 hours and 40 minutes, setting at 5:46, and it will rise tomorrow at 8:04. The Moon, at full today, will rise at 5:37 this evening.
The winter full moon rises very high in the sky. It follows a path across the sky at night that the Sun will take six months from now in July. On the full moon with binoculars or small telescope most craters are not very visible due to the lack of shadows. There are exceptions, those with dark or bright floors. The lunar seas are the large dark areas. These positions are for the early evening, as the Moon rises. Grimaldi can be seen as a dark ellipse near the lower left edge. Plato another dark ellipse is in the upper left. A bright spot with a darker circle around it on the lower right is the crater Tycho, which has several rays of ejecta laid out over long distances across the face of the Moon. Finally, there’s a bright spot on the left side of the Moon. That is the crater Aristarchus.
The event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Annotated full Moon. Major seas in upper case. Prominent craters in lower case. See text below. The image is rotated for 8 pm in late January. Credit Bob Moler.
Lunar seas
A – Mare Crisium (Sea of Crises)
B – Mare Fecunditatus (Sea of Fertility)
C – Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility)
D – Mare Serenitatis (Sea of Serenity)
E – Mare Imbrium (Sea of Showers)
F – Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms)
G – Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds)
H – Mare Humorum (Sea of Moisture)
I – Mare Nectaris (Sea of Nectar)
Craters
a – Grimaldi
b – Plato
c – Tycho
d – Aristarchus
e – Copernicus (Not mentioned in the program due to time constraints)
04/07/2020 – Ephemeris – Today is the Paschal full moon
This is Ephemeris for Tuesday, April 7th. Today the Sun will be up for 13 hours and 6 minutes, setting at 8:18, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:09. The Moon, at full today, will rise at 7:55 this evening.
Tonight’s full moon is the Paschal full moon, the first full moon of spring which is tomorrow in the Holy Land, so Passover begins at sunset tomorrow. Easter for western churches falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring, which is this next Sunday the 12th. Orthodox Easter rule adds that it must fall after Passover,a week long observance, which pushes their Easter celebration to a week later, April 19th. Both Christian churches attempt to mimic the Jewish Lunar Calendar by setting Easter by the first full moon of spring using solar based calendars and assuming that spring started on March 21st. This year actual spring started on the 20th in the Holy Land, and 19th here by 10 minutes, in our Gregorian Calendar and 13 days earlier by the old Julian Calendar. This is all very complicated.
The event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
06/06/2019 – Ephemeris – The 75th anniversary of D-Day, the astronomical connection
Ephemeris for Thursday, June 6th. Today the Sun will be up for 15 hours and 26 minutes, setting at 9:25, and it will rise tomorrow at 5:57. The Moon, 3 days past new, will set at 12:40 tomorrow morning.
Today is the 75th anniversary of the greatest battle of World War II was the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, a date governed by the position of the Moon. The full moon on June the 6th, 1944 gave light for the gliders and paratroopers to carry out their operations at midnight. Plus the high tides were near noon and midnight and the low tides near dawn. The idea was to hit the beach at low tide to enable the landing craft to operate without hitting the obstacles the Germans planted in the tidal zone. It was great for the landing craft, but the troops had a lot of open beach to cover to get to some sort of shelter. The best days for the invasion were the 5th, 6th and 7th of June. Bad weather on the 5th caused a one day postponement.
The times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
01/30/2018 – Ephemeris – Looking for tomorrow’s lunar eclipse
Ephemeris for Tuesday, January 30th. The Sun will rise at 8:04. It’ll be up for 9 hours and 44 minutes, setting at 5:48. The Moon, 1 day before full, will set at 8:04 tomorrow morning.
At a bit before 5 this morning the Moon passed perigee, it closest approach to the Earth in its monthly orbit of the Earth. It was 223,072 miles (359,000 km) away. That makes tonight’s Moon, 12 hours or less before full, a super moon. It will rise tonight at about 5:01. However it’s setting that is of interest because it will be in eclipse. The partial phase of tomorrow morning’s lunar eclipse will begin at 6:48 a.m. (11:48 UT), when the upper left part of the Moon will enter the Earth’s inner shadow, called the umbra. The Moon will be fully immersed in the shadow beginning at 7:51 a.m. (12:51 UT). It will probably disappear by then because the Sun will rise just after 8 a.m. and the Moon will set, at least in the Interlochen/Traverse City area at, 8:04.
The times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
The partially eclipsed Moon in twilight at 7:40 a.m. January 31, 2018 from Traverse City, MI as simulated by Stellarium.
The following is an article I submitted to Green Elk Rapids website that was also published in the Elk Rapids News. Elk Rapids is a village about 20 miles north of Traverse City on the east shore of Grand Traverse Bay. I added the metric units for this post.
We will have a calendrical coincidence on January 31st along with a natural event, and just missing another natural event all having to do with the Moon. The first is that the full moon on January fits one of the definitions for a “blue moon”, the second full moon in a month. Of course the Moon doesn’t actually turn blue. It doesn’t really care. Since February is shorter than a lunation, a lunar month, it will not have a full moon. However March will have two full moons like January.
The second is a real event. The Moon being opposite the Sun in the sky, the definition of a full moon, will pass into the Earth’s shadow causing a lunar eclipse or eclipse of the Moon. In this case, a total eclipse. A lunar eclipse of some type occurs in about one in six full moons. We only have to be on the night side of the Earth to see it. That’s the rub this time, because the eclipse will be in progress at sunrise. The partial phase starts at 6:48 a.m. From about 6:30 on the upper left part of the Moon will appear dusky as the Moon sinks deeper in the Earth’s outer shadow, where the Sun is only partially blocked. The Moon will sink farther and farther into the Earth’s inner shadow called the umbra until at 7:51 a.m. it will be totally immersed. By then the sky will be quite bright, with sunrise to occur at 8:02. The Moon should completely disappear and will set unseen at 8:04. Folks a few states west of us will see, more than likely, a coppery colored totally eclipsed Moon. Some TV preacher some years ago called it a blood moon, hoping to sell books about the end times.*
The color comes from the sum of all the sunrise and sunsets happening on Earth at that instant. The red sunrise we see is caused by the blue light being scattered out of the Sun’s light by molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere. It gives us the blue sky. Our atmosphere also bends the Sun’s light. When we see the full disc of the Sun just clear the horizon, it’s still actually fully below the horizon. The light of the sunrise that passes over our heads continues on, being bent further and becoming redder, and fills the Earth’s shadow by the time it reaches the Moon’s distance, making the Moon red. Volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere can make the Moon almost disappear during totality.
This full moon is also a so-called “super moon”. These occur when the full moon is nearest the Earth in its monthly orbit of the Earth. January first’s full moon was the closest of the year, you might say a super-duper moon. The Moon reached its perigee, closest point or 221,581 miles (356,600 km) away 5 hours before the Moon was officially full. This time perigee is the day before full, about 1,500 miles (2,400 km) farther away. These are measured center to center. The closest an Elk Rapids observer will be to the Moon on the 31st will be at about 12:30 a.m. at 219,920 miles (353,927 km), subtracting most of the Earth’s radius. Of course the Moon won’t look that big being high in the south then. By moon set it will retreat to 223,778 miles (360,136 km) from an Elk Rapids observer. The increased apparent size of the rising or setting Sun or Moon is an optical illusion. The Moon is closer to us when high in the sky than when on the horizon.
The next lunar eclipse visible to us is next year, on the night of January 20-21, 2019.
* The Elk Rapids News didn’t like my dig about the TV preacher and omitted this sentence. I rather expected them to.
Credit NASA.
The original page for this graphic is: https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/LEplot/LEplot2001/LE2018Jan31T.pdf
Total Lunar Eclipse January 31
Event Time EST Time UT
GT Area
Enter penumbra 5:51 a.m. 10:51 Unseen
Begin partial phase 6:48 a.m. 11:48
Totality begins 7:51 a.m. 12:51
Sun rises 8:02 a.m.
Moon sets 8:04 a.m.
Mid eclipse 13:28
Totality ends 14:07
End partial phase 15:11
Leave penumbra 16:08 Unseen
The shading of the penumbra is generally noticeable within 1/2
hour before the partial phase begins and again after it ends.
04/14/2014 – Ephemeris – Why does Easter occur on a different Sunday every year?
The answer is astronomical!
Ephemeris for Good Friday, Friday, April 14th. The Sun will rise at 6:59. It’ll be up for 13 hours and 26 minutes, setting at 8:26. The Moon, 3 days past full, will rise at 11:48 this evening.
Easter will be celebrated by western and eastern christian churches this Sunday. Easter is a movable feast in that it falls on a different date each year following the first full moon of spring. It’s an attempt to follow the Jewish Passover, which starts on the 15th of the month of Nisan. Being a lunar calendar the 15th the generally the night of the full moon. And since the Last Supper was a Seder, the Christian church wanted to follow Passover as closely as possible using the Roman solar based calendar where the year was 365.25 days long. Passover started at sunset this past Monday night. The western churches eventually adopted the Gregorian calendar to keep in sync with the seasons. The Eastern churches did not, however Easter is late enough this year so they both fall on the same date.
The times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
The seasonal, or officially the Tropical Year, from vernal equinox to vernal equinox is approximately 365.24220 days long, about 11 1/2 minutes shorter than the Julian (after Julius Caesar) Calendar year. The Julian Calendar kept up with the year by having three 365 ordinary years and one leap year of 366 days. It over corrects. To make the calculation for Easter easier in the various dioceses of the far-flung church, the vernal equinox, the day the Sun crosses the celestial equator, heading northward was defined as March 21st. The actual vernal equinox was falling behind the Julian Calendar by 0.8 days every century.
By 1582 the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Gregory XIII decided to correct the problem. By then the real vernal equinox occurred on March 11th. Easter is supposed to be a spring feast, and using March 21st as the vernal equinox would eventually push Easter into summer. The Pope instituted a commission to look into the problem. This commission headed by Christophorus Clavius* came up with what we know as the Gregorian Calendar. First, eliminate 10 days from the calendar. This was done in October 1582 between October 4th and 15th. Then to keep the calendar in sync with the actual year it was decreed that leap years would continued for years divisible by 4; except that century years, those divisible by 100 be ordinary years, except those by also divisible by 400. Thus the year 1900 was an ordinary year, but the year 2000 was a leap year, and the year 2100 will be an ordinary year. Adoption of this as a civil calendar took 400 years to be universal.
The Greek Orthodox and other eastern churches kept the Julian Calendar, so on occasion their Easter is sometimes celebrated in May. The Jewish Calendar is, as I alluded to in the program transcript, a lunar calendar. It has a relationship to the Julian Calendar in that 19 Julian Years equals 235 lunar months almost exactly. This is called the Metonic Cycle. Those 235 months equal 12 lunar years of 12 and 13 months. So without correction Passover too will slowly head into summer in millennia to come.
* Clavius was honored by having a large, rather spectacular crater on the Moon named for him. Search these posts for Clavius to find it.
08/18/2016 – Ephemeris – Viewing the full Moon tonight
Ephemeris for Thursday, August 18th. The Sun rises at 6:49. It’ll be up for 13 hours and 53 minutes, setting at 8:42. The Moon, at full today, will rise at 8:54 this evening.
The full moon, contrary to what you’d think is a poor time to observe it. The moon is essentially gray on gray. And at full moon we are looking at the moon from about the same perspective as the sun, so there are no shadows to delineate its fine features. Since the actual instant of full moon occurred at 5:27 this morning, some shadows will be creeping in on the moon’s upper right face as it is seen in the evening. Full moon is the best time to see the maria or lunar seas, the dark areas that make up the man in the moon. In binoculars can be seen the bright rays* emanating from the crater Tycho near the south end of the moon. Other craters have rays too, but none so long and distinctive. Night by night for the next two weeks the moon’s illuminated landscape will wane.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
* Rays are caused by the ejecta from the impact that created the crater. They are thought to be small craters themselves which show up best at full moon because they have no shadows in them.
Addendum
The full Moon taken last night, 7 hours before to was officially full. The contrast was greatly enhanced to bring out Tycho’s ray system. Credit Bob Moler.
10/27/2015 – Ephemeris – Hunter’s Moon
Ephemeris for Tuesday, October 27th. The Sun will rise at 8:13. It’ll be up for 10 hours and 25 minutes, setting at 6:39. The Moon, at full today, will rise at 7:09 this evening.
Tonight’s full moon is known as the Hunter’s Moon because it is the full moon after the harvest moon. The minute the Moon will be full will be at 7:05 this morning, about an hour before it sets. This was the time Native Americans and Europeans went out to secure the meat for the winter. And it also coincides with the time of year of our hunting seasons. So in that regard it fits nicely. The names of the full moons throughout the year generally mesh with the activities or weather conditions of that month. For instance December’s full moon is the Cold Moon or the Long Nights Moon. December has the longest nights. This list is taken from farmersalmanac.com, the website of the Old Framers Almanac, from which I’ve been getting folklore tidbits for years.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Other sources for full moon names:
- Wikipedia
- EarthSky
- MoonConnection
- Or just search for: full moon names
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 