The Blue Moon welcomes the New Year

There she is, Miss Blue Moon, high in the AZ sky...

Welcoming 2010.

Happy New Year!

Crescent Earth

picture by NASA

Crescent Earth

The crescent Earth rises above the lunar horizon in this spectacular photograph taken from the Apollo 17 spacecraft in lunar orbit during final lunar landing mission in the Apollo program.

Watch out, you might get hit by a meteor

It reminds me of the movie "Lilo and Stitch" where the aliens describe the earth as a planet that faces extinction whenever it is hit my a meteor. This National Geographic story tells describes what happened in Peru when a thing fell out of the sky.

The cow didn't jump over the moon...

The moon hid behind the earth's shadow in last night's lunar eclipse. The alarm clock sounded at 2:30 am and the gang stepped outside for a sight not to take place again for 7 years.

Liquid lakes on Titan

Titan, Saturn's moon.

The Cassini flyby of July 22, 2006, confirmed the existence of lakes of liquid methane on Saturn's moon Titan. Radar imaging data from the flyby, published this week in the journal Nature, provide convincing evidence for large bodies of liquid.

This image, used on the journal's cover, gives a taste of what Cassini saw. Intensity in this colorized image is proportional to how much radar brightness is returned, or more specifically, the logarithm of the radar backscatter cross-section. The colors are not a representation of what the human eye would see.

International Space Station 2

by Duda

A child's work.

Materials: cardboard boxes, straws, tape (lots), paper, popsicle sticks, string, soda bottle.

Purpose: "People from earth go in the space ship and they fly over to the space station which is in outer space. They use the International Space Station to study whatever they have to study and then go home."

Hyakutake on March 27

by Joe Orman


Comet C/1996 B2 Hyakutake and a Saguaro cactus, Arizona

"On January 30, 1996, Yuji Hyakutake in Japan discovered a new comet using 25x150 binoculars. The comet was designated Comet C/1996 B2 (Hyakutake). As subsequent observations of the new comet were obtained, Brian Marsden from the IAU Central Bureau was able to compute the comet's orbital elements, and these computations indicated that the comet will pass as close as 0.10 AU (9.3 million miles) from the Earth on March 25, 1996" NASA

The Equinox

by Joe Orman

A canal in AZ

Every place on earth experiences a 12 hours day twice a year on the Spring and Fall Equinox. This canal runs East - West.