Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
June 13, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
June 13, 2014
-Vega is the brightest star shining in the east after dusk. It's currently the top star of the big Summer Triangle. The brightest star to Vega's lower left is Deneb. Look farther to Vega's lower right for Altair. The Summer Triangle will climb higher in early evening all through the summer, to pose highest overhead at dusk when fall begins.
-A coronal mass ejection hurled into space by the double X-flare of June 10th could sideswipe Earth's magnetic field today. NOAA forecasters estimate a 50% chance of polar geomagnetic storms in response to the glancing blow.
-For soccer fans, Friday the 13th is a lucky day because the World Cup is underway. The world's biggest sports event began yesterday in Brazil with a game between the host country and Croatia. (Brazil won.) To celebrate the kickoff, Jean-Baptiste Feldmann took this picture of the Moon rising over Nuits-Saint-Georges, France.
The fact that this month's full Moon falls on Friday the 13th has been widely noted in the media. Such a coincidence is not particularly rare. The last Friday the 13th full Moon occurred on Aug. 13, 2011. The next one will be on Aug. 13, 2049.
Neither is the coincidence unlucky. Folklore holds that all kinds of wacky things happen under the light of a full Moon. Supposedly, hospital admissions increase, the crime rate ticks upward, and people behave strangely. The idea that the full Moon causes mental disorders was widespread in the Middle Ages. Even the word "lunacy," meaning "insanity," comes from the Latin word for "Moon." The majority of modern studies, however, show no correlation between the phase of the Moon and the incidence of crime, sickness, or human behavior. This is true even on Fridays.
-Last week NASA's Curiosity rover witnessed something no one has ever seen from the surface of another world: a planetary transit of the sun. As the sun rose over Mars' Gale Crater on June 3rd, Curiosity's two-eyed MastCam tracked the shadowy silhouette of Mercury crossing the solar disk. In addition to showing Mercury, the same MastCam frames show two sunspots approximately the size of Earth.
This is the first transit of the sun by a planet observed from any planet other than Earth, and also the first imaging of Mercury from Mars. Mercury fills only about one-sixth of one pixel as seen from such a great distance, so the darkening does not have a distinct shape. Nevertheless, it is definitely Mercury as the shadow follows Mercury's expected path based on orbital calculations.
On Earth, it is possible to observe solar transits of Mercury and Venus, although they are rare. Last seen in June 2012, Venus transits are typically separated by more than a hundred years. The next Mercury transit visible from Earth will be May 9, 2016. Mercury and Venus transits are visible more often from Mars than from Earth, and Mars also offers a vantage point for seeing Earth transits. The next of each type visible from Mars will be Mercury in April 2015, Venus in August 2030 and Earth in November 2084.
Astro Picture of the Day:
June 13, 2014
Source:
June's Full Moon (full phase on June 13, 0411 UT) is traditionally known as the Strawberry Moon or Rose Moon. Of course those names might also describe the appearance of this Full Moon, rising last month over the small Swedish village of Marieby. The Moon looks large in the image because the scene was captured with a long focal length lens from a place about 8 kilometers from the foreground houses. But just by eye a Full Moon rising, even on Friday the 13th, will appear to loom impossibly large near the horizon. That effect has long been recognized as the Moon Illusion. Unlike the magnification provided by a telescope or telephoto lens, the cause of the Moon illusion is still poorly understood and not explained by atmospheric optical effects, such as scattering and refraction, that produce the Moon's blushing color and ragged edge also seen in the photograph.