Article source: http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/news/a382571/johnny-harris-elias-koteas-tom-cullen-join-last-days-on-mars.html

The term applies to the full moon that is the largest of the year, occurring when the full moon happens when the moon is closest to us in its orbit, at so-called perigee.

The term “supermoon” was new to me until last year, when the tsunami that devastated Japan was blamed on one. I was compelled to discuss it in Intro Astronomy class – not for astronomical reasons but because we also discuss pseudoscience. For most of the students this would be their only college science course, and I would be remiss to not also discuss what is not science, and how we tell the difference.

I discovered the term did not derive from science at all, but from astrology – a practice that was debunked long ago as baseless pseudoscience.

The moon, super or not, does not trigger earthquakes and tsunamis.

But of course when the moon is closest to us it will appear larger. Its elliptical orbit makes it vary by about 10 percent in distance and apparent size. But I think much ado was made about nothing (or little), since you are not likely to notice such a small difference. On June 3, the moon will be full again a day after perigee and less than one half of one percent farther away than in May. The moon will be just about as super then as a month ago.

A stronger effect of a close moon is on our tides, since most tidal variation is caused by the moon. The sun does have about half the effect of the moon, so when they line up at new and full phases we get maximum tides. Add in the closer moon, and coastal fishermen and surfers can expect extreme tides again at the beginning of June.

Sometimes these alignments occur when the Earth is closest to the sun, in January. Such a pairing occurred a century ago this year, and the extreme tides probably increased the breaking off of icebergs. The moon and sun may well have doomed the Titanic.

Finally, try to catch the June almost-supermoon rising (at sunset), or setting for the maximum effect.

It always looks larger near the horizon – not that it is larger, but we get that illusion. It looks smaller when it is high up in the air.

Article source: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/05/20/3247057/just-how-super-is-our-moon.html

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THIS WEEK: This evening a stunning event will take place for millions of people in the western United States, as an annular eclipse of the sun will occur close to sunset.
 
Unfortunately, Mobile will get to see very little of the event. If skies are clear this evening to the horizon, the sun will set with a piece of it “bitten off” by the new moon.
 
But for people in a 150-mile-wide path from Lubbock, Texas, to the California-Oregon border, sunset will be spectacular, with the sun reduced to a ring as it bids farewell for the night.
 
An annular eclipse (from the Latin “annulus” or ring) happens when the moon crosses in front of the sun at one of the far points in its orbit. One such eclipse occurred from Washington County, Ala., northeastward at midday on May 31, 1984.
 
Even in Mobile, where the sun was 98 percent covered but not fully annular, the event was stunning. By comparison, today’s eclipse will cover about 88 percent of the sun at maximum.
 
Consider this one a warm-up. On Aug. 21, 2017, a completely total eclipse will cross the United States from Oregon to South Carolina, including Clarksville and Nashville in Tennessee.

DID YOU KNOW? A solar eclipse is actually an occultation, in which one object moves in front of another. A lunar eclipse is a true eclipse in the scientific sense.

You can email stars@press-register.com with your questins and comments.

Article source: http://blog.al.com/stars-over-alabama/2012/05/stars_over_the_coast_astronomy_106.html

In the weekly “Bits and Bytes” column we’ll relay the past week’s news highlights from our backyard giants, start-ups and small businesses alike.

Planning on watching the solar eclipse Sunday evening? NASA’s interactive Google map is helping West Coast viewers track the exact time the moon will pass in front of the sun, covering up to 94 percent of it.

Chinese authorities approved Google’s bid to buy Motorola Mobility, taking the company one step closer to closing a $12.5 billion deal next week. That’s at least if they meet one condition: make the Android operating system for mobile devices available to all at no cost for the next five years.

On Friday, when Facebook went public, LinkedIn shares dropped 5.7 percent by the end of the day. Still, it didn’t fare as badly as sites such as Zynga, which dropped by 13.4 percent, and Yelp, which closed down 12.3 percent. LinkedIn’s CEO Reid Hoffman benefitted from the move, as his initial $35.8 million investment is now valued around $144 million.

Intuit reported this week that its third quarter profits grew by 6.7 percent. The company, which makes the TurboTax software, also said its tax customer base grew by 11 percent during that period.

Mozilla is jumping on the app store bandwagon. In the next few weeks, the browser will be putting its marketplace into a beta mode. It will feature apps built using web development technologies, such as  HTML5 for structure and JavaScript for logical implementation

Article source: http://mountainview.patch.com/articles/nasa-launches-interactive-map-to-view-eclipse-mozilla-readies-new-app-store

(CNN) — About every two weeks, Rick Allen gets a series of thermal snapshots from high above Earth that show how water gets used across the western United States, a perennial source of friction in the largely arid region.

“We see all of the cold spots, which are irrigated fields,” said Allen, the director of the Water Resources Research Program at the University of Idaho. “We take the relative temperatures and transform that into an equivalent of an amount of water used in cubic feet per acre per day, or cubic meters, or inches of depth. We can transform that information into types of units that are used by water managers and state agencies to manage water consumption.”

The stream of data that Allen dips into has been flowing since 1984, when NASA’s Landsat 5 satellite went into orbit. Landsat 5 finally shut down in November, and it successor, Landsat 7, beams back a set of images of Allen’s region to the U.S. Geological Survey every 16 days — but because of a faulty scanner, they come in with black streaks across them. A replacement is being readied for launch, but it’s unlikely to make it aloft before January.

“We’ll be hobbling through the year 2012 using only Landsat 7 with incomplete imagery,” Allen said. “That’s really hurting us badly.”

It’s a problem facing other scientists as well, as a combination of budget pressure, program delays and a pair of launch failures leaves the United States facing a “rapid decline” in its fleet of Earth-science satellites, the National Academy of Sciences warns. Of 23 such satellites now aloft — carrying dozens of instruments that help weather forecasters produce storm warnings and measure pollution, ocean winds and sea levels — only six are expected to remain in operation by 2020, and efforts to replace them have stalled, the National Research Council reports.

“These precipitous decreases warn of a coming crisis in Earth observations from space, in which our ability to observe and understand the Earth system will decline just as Earth observations are critically needed to underpin important decisions facing our nation and the world,” according to a May report from the Academy’s National Research Council. “Advances in weather forecast accuracy may slow or even reverse, and gaps in time series of climate and other critical Earth observations are almost certain to occur.”

NASA calls the report “overly pessimistic,” however. In a statement to CNN, the space agency says many of its satellites have lasted far beyond their expected lifetimes, and that scientists are getting regular data from other countries’ probes.

“NASA is developing a set of missions that will both continue critical long-term data records and demonstrate new instruments and measurement approaches for important variables that are not presently being measured from space,” it said. “Our research portfolio remains robust.”

The NRC report follows up on a 2007 study that recommended a list of 17 satellite missions for the next decade. But Dennis Hartmann, who led the committee that produced the new report, said none of those have launched “because of a variety of reasons.”

“They didn’t get as much money to use as the decadal survey assumed,” said Hartmann, an atmospheric science professor at the University of Washington. “Some things cost more, especially launch vehicles, so the overall cost has gone up.”

Meanwhile, science budgets for both NASA and NOAA aren’t keeping pace with inflation, he said, and NASA has lost two previously planned missions after liftoff.

The 2009 Orbital Carbon Observatory was to have measured the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, while 2011′s Glory would have measured solar radiation and atmospheric aerosols. Both crashed into the Pacific Ocean when the shell around the satellites failed to break away from the boosters.

The kind of observations those probes send back are critical for climate researchers like Josh Willis, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Willis relies on radar imaging from the Jason-2 satellite, which monitors the rise in sea levels scientists say is a sign of a rise in global temperatures. Jason-2′s expected lifetime is up in mid-2013, but its scheduled replacement, Jason-3, isn’t likely to be launched until late 2014. If the current satellite goes out before the new one goes up, it would break a string of uninterrupted observations that date back to the early 1990s.

“One of the reasons it’s so good and powerful is we’ve been able to link together the satellite records before the last one gets old — we’ve been able to fly a new one and get some overlap,” Willis said. “What’s important is not just what sea level is today, but how today’s sea level relates back to the past.”

The NASA-launched, NOAA-funded satellite, about the size of a refrigerator, scans nearly all of Earth’s ocean surfaces every 10 days from about 800 miles up. It has been orbiting since 2008 — and while its lifespan is officially five years, Willis said its predecessor Jason-1 is still functioning at 10.

“It’s not super-healthy, but it’s still collecting data and it’s still being used,” he said.

Of the 17 recommended missions in the 2007 survey, 15 are still in the study and review phases, NASA spokesman Steve Cole told CNN. The remaining two are expected to launch by 2016, along with a replacement for the OCO.

In the meantime, the space agency is using more aircraft flyovers to take the place of satellite observations of the Arctic and Antarctic. The program, known as IceBridge, is aimed at filling a gap between the shutdown of the ICESAT orbiter in 2010 and the espected launch of its successor, ICESAT II, in 2015. But the report by Hartmann’s committee noted that the flights “must leave unobserved large portions of the major ice sheets and sea ice” until regular space-based observations resume.

NASA is already running two other airborne missions and plans to announce more in the coming year, Cole said.

And NOAA, which manages many of the satellite programs once the hardware has reached orbit, has also made arrangements to share data from a Japanese satellite launched last week. The first of a new series of NOAA satellites aimed at boosting the accuracy of long-range forecasts went into orbit in 2011, and it also carries instruments that monitor ozone levels, energy from sunlight and moisture in the air.

Article source: http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/20/us/us-satellite-crunch/index.html