Trippy

This is a rock the size of a house rolling down a slope on the moon. It seems so unlikely; we grow up assuming the moon is a cold, dead rock.

Clearly, something is going on. Moonquakes, perhaps?

Maybe it's the same thing that causes this. Rocks rolling around in Death Valley. No one knows why. Trippy.

I've read (but am to lazy to bother Googling it for a source) that water molecules dance about on the surface of the moon when sunlight hits the surface. They fall to the ground when it's dark, take up the dance once again the next time the sun clears the horizon.

The photo is from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. I grabbed it from Bad Astronomy.

AAA

That new header image is of Ida and Dactyl, an asteroid with its very own tiny moon.  I've always loved the photo.  Reminds me of a parent and child, bonded by gravity, rotating around a common center.  Plus, I didn't know asteroids could have moons. 

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A coupla cool comments about the photo in my last post (see below).  Margaret said it looked like a stellar semi-colon.  Laurita said her kid told her it looked like the moon was hanging by a thumbtack.  Nice.  I will never look at the Venus-moon pas de deux quite the same way again.

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Woke up at 4 a.m. yesterday to drive out just east of town and look for Comet McNaught.  Didn't find it.  It was oddly enjoyable still; I parked on a country road and cracked open a beer and scanned the sky right around Perseus with binoculars til the beer was gone.  Went home, went back to bed.  I'll look for it next month, after it's passed around the sun and is heading back out to its home in the Oort Cloud.

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The Mets have won 6 games straight.  A half a game outta first place.  Of course, this weekend we play the Evil Empire (the Yankees, for you uninitiated), so anything could happen.  We're also going to see a AAA ballgame on Sunday to celebrate Father's Day.  Free gloves to the first 1500 kids!  And we get to have a catch on the field before the game.  Big Fun.  Hot dogs will be involved. 

Balm

Bad photo. Lovely sight.

My favorite night skyscape is the crescent moon and Venus hanging in an evening sky. I like the rhythm of it, the way it occurs in bunches, Venus and crescent together for two or three nights in a row, then gone for a month, then back. And after a few months Venus will go away for awhile, loiter as a morning star for as long as a year. But it always comes back. And the whole dance begins again.

Had a long, difficult day yesterday. Being greeted by this sight at the end of it all made me better.

Death of the Bamboo Princess

The Japanese spacecraft Kaguya crashed into the moon last month. Before it did it shot some amazing HD footage of the moon, much of it viewable on YouTube, like this one. I don't know the name of this crater (as the captioning is in Japanese), but is sure is pretty.

Kaguya is named after the bamboo princess in the 10th century Japanese folktale, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. A childless woodcutter finds a tiny baby growing inside a glowing bamboo stalk. He takes her home to raise as his own. She grows into an extraordinarily beautiful woman. At the end of the story it's revealed she is not of this Earth, but rather a child of the moon, sent to the Earth for her own safety. The citizens of the moon take her back to her home against her will. Her parents are grief-stricken.