The Moon has fascinated mankind throughout the ages. One can discern two major types of terrain: relatively bright highlands and darker plains by simply viewing through the naked eye. By the middle of the 17th century, Galileo and other early astronomers made telescopic observations, noting an almost endless overlapping of craters. It has also been known for more than a century that the Moon is less dense than the Earth. Current knowledge of the Moon is greater than for any other solar system object except Earth. This lends to a greater understanding of geologic processes and further appreciation of the complexity of terrestrial planets. Neil Armstrong(July 20, 1969), became the first man to step onto the surface of the Moon. It was being followed by Edwin Aldrin - both of the Apollo 11 mission. They and other moon walkers experienced the effects of no atmosphere. Radio communications were used because sound waves can only be heard by travelling through the medium of air. The lunar sky is always black because diffraction of light requires an atmosphere. The astronauts also experienced gravitational differences. The moon’s gravity is one-sixth that of the Earth’s; a man who weighs 180 lbf (pound-force) on Earth weighs only 30 lbf on the Moon. (The equivalent metric weight (or force) is the Newton, where 4.45 Newtons equal one pound-force.)

• Moon distant from the earth = 384,403 kilometers (238,857 miles)
• diameter = 3,476 kilometers (2,160 miles)
• Both rotation and its revolution around Earth takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes

This synchronous rotation is caused by an unsymmetrical distribution of mass in the Moon, which has allowed Earth’s gravity to keep one lunar hemisphere permanently turned toward Earth. Very small but real librations (maximum about 0°.04) are caused by the effect of the Sun’s gravity and the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit, perturbing the Moon’s orbit and allowing cyclical preponderances of torque in both east-west and north-south directions.

Moon Statistics

Mass (kg) =========================================== 7.349e+22
Mass (Earth = 1) ====================================== 1.2298e-02
Equatorial radius (km) ================================== 1,737.4
Equatorial radius (Earth = 1) ============================= 2.7241e-01
Mean density (gm/cm^3) =============================== 3.34
Mean distance from Earth (km) =========================== 384,400
Rotational period (days) ================================ 27.32166
Orbital period (days) =================================== 27.32166
Average length of lunar day (days) ======================== 29.53059
Mean orbital velocity (km/sec) ============================ 1.03
Orbital eccentricity ==================================== 0.0549
Tilt of axis (degrees) =================================== 1.5424
Orbital inclination (degrees) ============================== 5.1454
Equatorial surface gravity (m/sec^2) ======================= 1.62
Equatorial escape velocity (km/sec) ======================== 2.38
Visual geometric albedo ================================= 0.12
Magnitude (Vo) ======================================= -12.74
Mean surface temperature (day) =========================== 107°C
Mean surface temperature (night) ========================= -153°C
Maximum surface temperature ============================ 123°C
Minimum surface temperature ============================= -233°C

Chronic exposure to traffic-related air pollution can make cells in the body look older — about 10 years older, a new study finds.
Air pollution is the introduction of chemicals, particulate matter, or biological materials that cause harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms, or damages the natural environment, into the atmosphere. The atmosphere is a complex, dynamic natural gaseous system that is essential to support life on planet Earth. Stratospheric ozone depletion due to air pollution has long been recognized as a threat to human health as well as to the Earth’s ecosystems.

Andrea Baccarelli of the University of Milan, Italy, and his colleagues extracted genetic material from white blood cells that had been collected from 57 office workers and 77 people who spent their days in the road directing traffic. They focused on telomeres, repetitive segments of DNA that serve as protective caps on the tips of chromosomes.

As a general rule, as cells divide, the length of that protective telomere in each successive generation shrinks. Eventually, the telomeres on some daughter cells become so short that a chromosome begins to degrade, which puts a halt to future cell division. After accounting for age, telomere shortening was roughly 15 percent greater in traffic officers than in the office workers, the researchers reported this week in San Diego at the American Thoracic Society annual meeting. Then they restricted their analysis to telomere length in the traffic officers. Each participant had been fitted with an air-sampling monitor to wear throughout a work day. It measured benzene, a gaseous constituent of auto exhaust. In this study, benzene readings served as a proxy for an individual’s exposure to the mix of pollutants associated with traffic. All of the traffic officers had been assigned street duty for at least five years. The average telomere length in those who worked in low-traffic areas (32 people) was about the same as those measured in the office workers. However, telomere length in the workers assigned to highly trafficked streets (45) was substantially shorter — equivalent to the shortening associated with about 10 years of age in normal healthy people.So, the blood of workers who regularly had high daily exposures to combustion exhaust “looked 10 years older” than it should.

There’s some debate about what such findings might mean, since blood assays do not measure effects from cells throughout the body. But the trend is worrisome, Baccarelli says, since a number of studies over the past decade have linked shorter telomeres with elevated risk of chronic ails, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Cash for cars ny Our network of New York junkyards and auto salvage yards will pay you cash for your junk car on the spot and offers free junk car removal in all of NY state.

A long-proposed tool for hunting planets has netted its first catch — a Jupiter-like planet orbiting one of the smallest stars known. A team of two astronomers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has, for the past 12 years, been mounting an astrometry instrument to a telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego. After careful, intermittent observations of 30 stars, the team has identified a new exoplanet around one of them — the first ever to be discovered around a star using astrometry.

Astrometry could be a powerful planet-hunting technique for both ground- and space-based telescopes. For example, a similar technique would be used by SIM Lite, a NASA concept for a space-based mission that is currently being explored. The newfound exoplanet, called VB 10b, is about 20 light-years away in the constellation Aquila. It is a gas giant, with a mass six times that of Jupiter’s, and an orbit far enough away from its star to be labeled a “cold Jupiter” similar to our own. In reality, the planet’s own internal heat would give it an Earth-like temperature.

The planet’s star, called VB 10, is tiny. It is what’s known as an M-dwarf and is only one-twelfth the mass of our sun, just barely big enough to fuse atoms at its core and shine with starlight. For years, VB 10 was the smallest star known — now it has a new title: the smallest star known to host a planet. In fact, though the star is more massive than the newfound planet, the two bodies would have a similar girth. Because the star is so small, its planetary system would be a miniature, scaled-down version of our own. For example, VB 10b, though considered a cold Jupiter, is located about as far from its star as Mercury is from the sun. Any rocky Earth-size planets that might happen to be in the neighborhood would lie even closer in.

“Some other exoplanets around larger M-dwarf stars are also similar to our Jupiter, making the stars fertile ground for future Earth searches,” said Stuart Shaklan, Pravdo’s co-author and the SIM Lite instrument scientist at JPL. “Astrometry is best suited to find cold Jupiters around all kinds of stars, and thus to find more planetary systems arranged like our home.” Two to six times a year, for the past 12 years, Pravdo and Shaklan have bolted their Stellar Planet Survey instrument onto Palomar’s five-meter Hale telescope to search for planets. The instrument, which has a 16-megapixel charge-coupled device, or CCD, can detect very minute changes in the positions of stars. The VB 10b planet, for instance, causes its star to wobble a small fraction of a degree. Detecting this wobble is equivalent to measuring the width of a human hair from about three kilometers away.

Other ground-based planet-hunting techniques in wide use include radial velocity and the transit method. Like astrometry, radial velocity detects the wobble of a star, but it measures Doppler shifts in the star’s light caused by motion toward and away from us. The transit method looks for dips in a star’s brightness as orbiting planets pass by and block the light. NASA’s space-based Kepler mission, which began searching for planets on May 12, will use the transit method to look for Earth-like worlds around stars similar to the sun. This discovery shows that planets can be found around extremely light-weight stars, this is a hint that nature likes to form planets, even around stars very different from the sun.”

Astronomers have succeeded in measuring the size of giant galaxy Messier 87 and it was find out that its outer parts have been stripped away by still unknown effects. The galaxy also appears to be on a collision course with another giant galaxy in this very dynamic cluster.

The new observations reveal that Messier 87’s halo of stars has been cut short, with a diameter of about a million light-years, significantly smaller than expected, despite being about three times the extent of the halo surrounding our Milky Way [1]. Beyond this zone only few intergalactic stars are seen.“This is an unexpected result,” says co-author Ortwin Gerhard. “Numerical models predict that the halo around Messier 87 should be several times larger than our observations have revealed. Clearly, something must have cut the halo off early on.”

The team used FLAMES, the super-efficient spectrograph at ESO’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, to make ultra-precise measurements of a host of planetary nebulae in the outskirts of Messier 87 and in the intergalactic space within the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, to which Messier 87 belongs. FLAMES can simultaneously take spectra many sources, spread over an area of the sky about the size of the Moon.

The new result is quite an achievement. The observed light from a planetary nebula in the Virgo Cluster is as faint as that from a 30-Watt light bulb at a distance of about 6 million kilometres (about 15 times the Earth–Moon distance). Furthermore, planetary nebulae are thinly spread through the cluster, so even FLAMES’s wide field of view could only capture a few tens of nebulae at a time. “It is a little bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, but in the dark”, says team member Magda Arnaboldi. “The FLAMES spectrograph on the VLT was the best instrument for the job”. At a distance of approximately 50 million light-years, the Virgo Cluster is the nearest galaxy cluster. It is located in the constellation of Virgo (the Virgin) and is a relatively young and sparse cluster. The cluster contains many hundreds of galaxies, including giant and massive elliptical galaxies, as well as more homely spirals like our own Milky Way.

The astronomers have proposed several explanations for the discovered “cut-off” of Messier 87’s, such as collapse of dark matter nearby in the galaxy cluster. It might also be that another galaxy in the cluster, Messier 84, came much closer to Messier 87 in the past and dramatically perturbed it about a billion years ago. “At this stage, we can’t confirm any of these scenarios,” says Arnaboldi. “We will need observations of many more planetary nebulae around Messier 87”. One thing the astronomers are sure about, however, is that Messier 87 and its neighbour Messier 86 are falling towards each other. “We may be observing them in the phase just before the first close pass”, says Gerhard. “The Virgo Cluster is still a very dynamic place and many things will continue to shape its galaxies over the next billion years.”

Draco is a long, glittering chain of faint stars that curls around between Ursa Major-the “Big Dipper” and Polaris-the “North Star“ on the east side.

It was one of the original 48 constellations charted by Ptolemy and was later adopted as one of the 88 modern constellations by the International Astronomical Union. This sprawling constellation covers 1083 square degrees of sky, yet only possesses 3 bright stars. The asterism of the “Dragon” is made of up 14 main stars and 75 Bayer/Flamsteed stellar designations reside within Draco’s confines. It is bordered by the constellations of Boötes Hercules, Lyra, Cygnus, Cepheus, Ursa Minor, Camelopardalis and Ursa Major. Draco is easily visible to viewers at latitudes between +90° and +15° and is best seen at culmination during the month of July.

There are three annual meteor showers associated with Draco - starting with the Delta Draconids. Each year between March 28 and April 7, the Earth begins to pass into the meteoroid stream, and bright streaks will seem to emanate from the sky at a point near the Cepheus border. This meteor shower activity peaks on or near the date of April 7 and the fall rate averages about 5 per hour at maximum. These are known to be very slow meteors. One June 20th, the Delta Draconid meteor shower peaks. These are the offspring of Comet Pons-Winnecke. This time the radiant is more near the handle of the Big Dipper and the fall rate can be anywhere from 10 to 100 meteors per hour on the average. October 9 marks the peak of the annual Draconid meteor shower, the progeny of Comet Giacobinni-Zinner. At times, when this comet has passed near Earth, the fall rate can be spectacular with rates up to 1000 per hour! Its radiant is near Hercules and it is not uncommon even during an “off” year to spot up to 200 meteors per hour during a dark night.

Alpha-”a” Draconis-the binoculars and brightest star name is Thuban and this 300 light year distant star has played an important role in our history. At one time, Thuban was a north pole star. Due to the precession of the equinoxes, it moved on… But by 10000 AD, Thuban will gradually move back toward the north celestial pole. In 20346 AD, it will again be the pole star. Of itself, Thuban is a binary star, much too close to be split. It is also a white giant star, more than 250 times more powerful than our Sun.

Beta Draconis-”B” name is Rastaban, which literally means “head of the serpent”. Rastaban is a G-type supergiant star, and it is also a binary star. It is located about 360 light years from our solar system and if you use a telescope you just might be about to spot the 11.5 magnitude dwarf star companion to this disparate double star!

On the other hand the Gamma Draconis-“Y” name is Eltanin, which pretty much means dragon, or serpent. Despite its Bayer designation of “gamma,” it is actually the brightest star in Draco, outshining Rastaban by nearly half a stellar magnitude. Right now Eltanin is 148 light years away from us, but the orange giant star won’t stay there long. In 1.5 million years, Eltanin will pass within 28 light years of Earth and will become the brightest star in the night sky.
Off to Psi 1 Draconis - it’s the designation that looks like a pitchfork with a 1 beside it. Here we have a great double star! Its traditional name Dziban and the primary of this pair has a nice, slight yellow coloration befitting of it’s F-spectral class and it can easily be split with binoculars. Omicron-“O” supergiant star that also has a gravitationally bound companion that can be picked off with small optics.

A “bonanza” of new planets has been found at the heart of our galaxy, NASA astronomers according to the NASA astronomers.

In the region known as the Galactic Bulge, sixteen potential planets have been detected. The mass of stars and hot gas at the center of the Milky Way some 26,000 light-years away. Of the 16 newly detected bodies, 7 have been deemed likely planets, with the remaining 9 awaiting confirmation.

A team of astronomers discovered the planets during a seven-day survey of the constellation Sagittarius using the Hubble Space Telescope in February 2004.

The faraway find has dramatic implications for the ongoing search for other, possibly habitable planets, scientists said. Most notably, the survey reveals that planets are as plentiful around distant stars as they are around stars closer to our solar system.

“We had [already] found all of these planets relatively near the sun. We wanted to know, Are they there all across the galaxy?” said Mario Livio, an astronomer with the Hubble project, at a press conference today at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“The answer was yes, they are there, even at the center of the galaxy. … This allows us to say now with a very high degree of confidence that there are literally billions of planets in our galaxy.”

One of the planets completes its orbit in only ten hours, meaning that one solar year passes on the far-flung world in about the same time you spend between breakfast and dinner. The planets, which are gas giants about the size of Jupiter, also orbit closer to their stars than any other known worlds.
They are only able to survive such close proximities because the stars they orbit are relatively light and dim, the scientists explained.

“These planets [are] extremely close to their stars—so close that they get heated by the stars’ radiation to almost 3000 degrees Fahrenheit [1650 degrees Celsius],” said Kailash Sahu, principal investigator of the project. If denser, brighter stars like our sun had similar planets orbiting so closely, “they would simply evaporate,” he added.

The astronomers were able to spot the planets using a pair of crucial clues. One is a telltale “wobble” that a star often adopts in its path through space when a planet is orbiting it. The other is a slight dimming that occurs when a planet passes in front of a star.

Planet Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun. Earth is the largest of the terrestrial planets in the Solar System in diameter, mass and density. It is also referred to as the World and Terra.

Earth’s outer surface is divided into several rigid segments, or tectonic plates, that gradually migrate across the surface over periods of many millions of years.

About 71% of the surface is covered with salt-water oceans, the remainder consisting of continents and islands; liquid water, necessary for all known life, is not known to exist on any other planet’s surface.

Earth’s interior remains active, with a thick layer of relatively solid mantle, a liquid outer core that generates a magnetic field, and a solid iron inner core.

Above the troposphere, the atmosphere is usually divided into the stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere. Each of these layers has a different lapse rate, defining the rate of change in temperature with height. Beyond these, the exosphere thins out into the magnetosphere.

Earth’s rotation period relative to the fixed stars, called its stellar day by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), is 86164.098903691 seconds of mean solar time (UT1), or 23h 56m 4.098903691s.

Earth’s rotation period relative to the precessing or moving mean vernal equinox, misnamed its sidereal day, is 86164.09053083288 seconds of mean solar time (UT1) (23h 56m 4.09053083288s).

Moon Phases Calendar - Full Moon Dates

You can find below the Next Full Moons Calendar for the next years.
The time is in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
If your local time zone is currently on Daylight Saving time, please add one hour to the standard times listed in the Moon phases tables.

:: Moon Phases Calendar - Next Full Moons ::

Acknowledgements

Some of the Data about the next full moons are from the Planetary Systems Branch of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Earth sciences for society

The International Year of Planet Earth aims to capture people’s imagination with the exciting knowledge we possess about our planet, and to see that knowledge used to make the Earth a safer, healthier and wealthier place for our children and grandchildren International Year of Planet Earth 2007-2009.

What is the International Year
of Planet Earth?

The International Year of Planet Earth aims to ensure greater and more effective use by society of the knowledge accumulated by the world’s 400,000 Earth scientists. The Year’s ultimate goal of helping to build safer, healthier and wealthier societies around the globe is expressed in the Year’s subtitle ‘Earth science for Society’.
The International Year runs from January 2007 to December 2009, the central year of the triennium (2008) having been proclaimed by the UN General Assembly as the UN Year. The UN sees the Year as a contribution to their sustainable development targets as it promotes wise (sustainable) use of Earth materials and encourages better planning and management to reduce risks for the world’s inhabitants.

How does it work?

The main activities of the International Year of Planet Earth operate within its Science and Outreach programmes. Funding for projects in both programmes is sought from industry, Foundations and governments worldwide. Both programmes essentially operate in a response, or ‘bottomup’ mode.

The Science Programme consists of 10 broad, societally relevant and multidisciplinary themes: health, climate, groundwater, ocean, soils, deep Earth, megacities, hazards, resources, and life. Brochures on each of these themes are available in hard copy, and can be downloaded from the Year’s website. Scientists from all countries of the world are invited to submit Expressions of Interest (EoIs) dedicated to specific questions within each theme.

The first lunar eclipse of 2009 is one of four such events during the year. The first three eclipses are penumbral while the last (on Dec. 31) is partial. The Feb 09 event is the deepest penumbral eclipse of the year with a penumbral magnitude of 0.899. It will be easily visible to the naked eye as a dusky shading in the northern half of the Moon. The times of the major phases are listed below.

Penumbral Eclipse Begins:  12:38:46 UT
Greatest Eclipse:          14:38:15 UT
Penumbral Eclipse Ends:	   16:37:40 UT

Of course, the beginning and end of a penumbral eclipse are not visible to the eye. In fact, no shading can be detected until about 2/3 of the Moon’s disk is immersed in the penumbra. This would put the period of eclipse visibility from approximately 14:00 to 15:20 UT. Keep in mind that this is only an estimate. Atmospheric conditions and the observer’s visual acuity are important factors to consider. An interesting exercise is to note when penumbral shading is first and last seen.

Figure 3 shows the path of the Moon through the penumbra as well as a map of Earth showing the regions of eclipse visibility. Eastern Canada and the USA will miss the eclipse entirely since the eclipse begins after moonset. Observers in western Canada and the USA will have the best views with moonset occurring sometime after mid-eclipse. To catch the entire event, one must be in Alaska, Hawaii, Australia, or East Asia.