Bonus Coverage

8 01 2018

Your Blogmeister’s Secret Hideout

Lunar eclipse at the end of the month.

Slight hitch is that, at St. Louis’s location, The Moon enters Earth’s umbral shadow just before moonset.  The farther west you go in the continental United States, the more of the eclipse one will be able to see.

The red line is the unobstructed horizon, which you need to be at least some distance above the ground to see that far  —  At ground level, even in the best of level flat circumstances, the practical horizon is above the theoretical horizon.  The moon will set at just about the perfect west-north-west direction from my location.

Click to enlarge.


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6 responses

8 01 2018
countenance

Just so you know, the software I screencapped is free, and can be looted from:

http://www.hnsky.org/software.htm

It’s not for anyone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, just to warn you.

8 01 2018
countenance

It also so happens that this lunar eclipse is also a blue moon, i.e. the second full moon in a month, last one was on January 1. Now, that seems counterintuitive, because we get the very concept of a month (“MOON”-th) from the about 29.5 day synodic lunar orbit around the Earth with respect to the sun. Of course, the way things work out with the calendar, months had to be arranged differently, meaning that “every once in a blue moon,” there will be two full moons in a month. If one’s culture has a luni-solar calendar, then it’s a moot point.

8 01 2018
Puggg

There hasn’t been any word about extra detail, so I guess this means people don’t go to moon eclipses like they go to sun eclipses.

8 01 2018
countenance

Bingo, because TLEs happen way more often than TSEs, and furthermore, a given TLE is visible over way more of the Earth than a given TSE. The main reason is that while Moon from Earth is the same visual apparent size, the Earth from the Moon is way bigger than the Sun, and from the surface of the Moon, the Earth “eclipsing” the Sun is better described as the Earth “occulting” the Sun,” as an occultation, eclipse and transit are all the same thing, the only difference is whether the apparent foreground object is way bigger than, about the same size as, or way smaller than, the background object. Moon occults Jupiter, Moon eclipses Sun, Venus transits the Sun.

The Moon becomes red during a TLE for the same reason that a clear day sunrise and sunset, the sun has a reddish appearance. At sunrise or sunset, the sun’s direct visual rays are passing through more atmosphere to get to your eyes, from the side on, and there’s more atmospheric scattering. Overhead, the sun appears yellow because it’s a direct shot down through the atmosphere. But, the increased side-on atmospheric path scatters the light so that it’s scattered all the way down to red. During a TLE, the Sun’s light side-on scatters through the Earth’s atmosphere all the way around, as visual red, hits the Moon, then reflects back to Earth. If one is standing on the Moon during what we call a TLE, the regolith (“ground”) around you would turn red for that reason.

If the Earth had no atmosphere, the Moon would totally disappear during a TLE. Then again, if the Earth had no atmosphere, we wouldn’t be here, so it’s a moot point.

One more thing, for anyone who has never seen a TLE:

There’s also a lesson here for the MUH FWAT ERFF kooks — Notice that the Earth shadow subsuming the visible disk of the Moon and then later retreating from it is curved, not a line. Meaning Earth is spherical, not flat.

8 01 2018
Alex the Goon

My Flat Earth guy mentioned how our previous calendar used to be 364 days (13 months, 28 days each), the #365 being a holiday or whatever. Sounded interesting, considering the absurdity of the 28,29,30,31-days we currently have.
So I looked into it. The 3rd or 4th website I found had colored charts to assign bullshit astrological hippie “significance” to different days, seemingly on a biorhythmic pattern. So instead of having a simple deal where every month has 28 days, 4 weeks, and always begins on a Sunday, you’d have some Sumerian fruitloop reminding you that next Tuesday is when your aura colllides with your karma, or somesuch. I think some emperor finally blew his fuse at that shit, and that’s how we ended up ditching that system for Current Calendar Based On Nothing.
Strangely enough, that old 13×28 also wasn’t aligned on celestial events, like solstices or when Orion’s dick pointed at the Big Dipper.

22 01 2018

It's your dime, spill it. And also...NO TROLLS ALLOWED~!

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