The moon, yesterday evening in the snow. It’s the closest it’s been for twenty years but frankly it always looks about this size to me.
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
The moon, yesterday evening in the snow. It’s the closest it’s been for twenty years but frankly it always looks about this size to me.
A Bad Guide
That is utterly stunning. I could stare at it for hours. Thank you for going out to take that photo. I gasped.
Near or far away, the peaceful and beautiful scene the moon show us in this photo is fantastic.
Catannea is right: thank you!
We went out yesterday to take pictures of the moon in the city, but it was too high when we finished our dinner…
It looks just like many other nights. Beautiful, always, though.
Oh, thanks! I’m glad you like it.
What I want to know is, just what is the moon up to, sneaking ever closer over the last twenty years, encroaching on my private space ? It should back off first, then we can discuss “peaceful and beautiful”.
I read about the super moon, that was going to be both bigger and brighter. It was fairly high in the sky when I saw it the last two nights, and it looked just a tad bigger than usual, but it did look very bright.
The photo is beautiful. I don’t think the moon would normally shine so brightly on the snow (unless you had a long exposure, perhaps?)
Stu: sneaking up
I went out yesterday night with my daughter and her friend, both nine. The friend had never heard of the Man in the Moon, so when I told that people used to see a man there, she was frightened and wanted to go home.
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”, in aesthetic matters as well as political ones.
I always liked the idea that it might be made of green cheese. I’m thinking of Stilton.
It was really bright, yesterday. They were long exposures, but I should have done a shorter one to get some detail of its surface. But it was so bright that when I switched off the living room lights to go to bed there was moonlight streaming in and casting a shadow of the window mullions on the wood floor. That doesn’t normally happen.
I’m not sure if it’s been sneaking up steadily over the past 20 years or if it suddenly did it. I think it’s the latter, something to do with elliptical orbit. Trond, aren’t you an astronomer? You must know this. Siganus Sutor knows these things.
It should back off first, then we can discuss “peaceful and beautiful”.
¡jajajaja!
Problems with close relationships, Stu? Don’t you want to talk about this in your next session? ;-)
>Trond, sissy girlfriends (or worst: with no imagination) are always annoying!
“I always liked the idea that it might be made of green cheese. I’m thinking of Stilton.” But Stilton nowadays is made from pasteurised milk. I can’t think of the moon as pasteurised – that would be absurd.
Well, I don’t know about you, but it goes past my eyes.
Someone says, “It would be a [Casper David] Friedrich painting, if it had a solitary figure.”
To which I was about to protest, “but it does!”
I had it seems taken the dot on the horizon between the trees, on the left, for a solitary figure.
(And in fact, though I will be the first to admit to failing vision, I believe I will choose to continue to see that dot as a solitary figure, if no one minds.)
I don’t mind. I should have thought of Casper David Friedrich. I’m afraid I was thinking more Edward Gorey & Arthur Rackham. Most of my pictures last night had a strange blue dot in them, my wife’s too. It looks like a water drop, but there wasn’t one on the camera lens.
sissy girlfriends (or worst: with no imagination) are always annoying!
When you get scared by the man in the moon, lack of imagination is not your problem. Actually the imagination helped when I told that other cultures see a rabbit, a frog or a turtle there. She saw a lobster.
aren’t you an astronomer? You must know this. Siganus Sutor knows these things.
Martian structural engineers are another species. I think they design their buildings to resist heavy moonlight. I don’t have to follow the moon that closely. Actually I had to be told about this Friday evening by the father of one of my daughter’s other friends. But once I know about it I’m able to tell what it is. It has to do with the elliptic orbit. The orbited object is in one of the two focal points*, which means that the moon is at its closest exactly once per orbit, and the simple answer is that that’s where we are now.
However, and if I am to believe my source, the moon is supposed to come even (slightly) closer in six years, and I don’t know why, except that nothing in the universe is perfect. Influence form other planets? The fact that even the earth is moving in an elliptical orbit? Or maybe he was wrong. Siganus will know.
*) As we know, one way to define the ellipse is by two given focal points and a constant distance that’s the sum of the distances from any point on the circumference to the two focal points. Translated to a beach game: Attach a plug to each end of a string and ram them into the sand. Use a stick to draw the curve that keeps the string tight. If both ends of the string are attached to the same plug, then your rope is a compass and the ellipse becomes a circle.
The moon gets that close abut once every 27 days. The moon is full about once every 29 days. What hadn’t happened in 20 years was the close approach coinciding with the fullness.
In fact, Grumbly, the moon is gradually easing away from us, at about an inch a year.
abutabout (Fortunately the moon never actually abuts the earth.)inchinch and a halfI also want to mention the word plenilune. Did I learn that at Siganus’ blog, or where was it?
In fact, Grumbly, the moon is gradually easing away from us, at about an inch a year.
How can that be ? The moon is merely falling towards the earth, at the same time as it tries to escape perpendicularly. Is there an invisible mass of Black Stilton that is drawing it away ?
The statement that it is trying to escape seems inconsistent with your earlier accusation.
Which direction do you mean by “perpendicularly”? What do you mean by “merely”?
Seriously, it’s a tidal thing: due to a slight lopsidedness of the earth, the moon’s pull works to slow the earth’s spin, and it seems that this must (for the sake of conservation of energy) be accompanied by a backing away.
The statement that it is trying to escape seems inconsistent with your earlier accusation.
Not if it were sneaking up by means of a decaying orbit.
Which direction do you mean by “perpendicularly”?
The one that I should have called “tangential”.
What do you mean by “merely”?
I mean: “what else does it have to do ?”.
I actually had a half-notion that the moon was in a decaying orbit. You say it is backing away. So, if I understand this correctly, the moon would remain peaceful, beautiful and equidistant, provided we could rev up the earth’s spin.
I seem to remember that Superman accomplished something similar but opposite in sign. He zoomed around the planet so fast, against the spin, that it made time go backwards.
If the earth could be rotated by 90 degrees the current poles would be at the new equator and all the snow in Norway would melt. It will never happen, because nobody will be able to agree about where the new poles ought to be, though the Greenwich meridian’s intersection with the current equator seems the obvious choice for one of them.
It will never happen, because nobody will be able to agree about where the new poles ought to be
Well, then the new positions must be determined by fiat. Whoever has the power to realise a planetary adjustment of that magnitude should also be able to ride rough-shod over democratic processes without a qualm.
We got excited by the “super moon” (upon which the Daily Mail is blaming earthquakes!) and perturbed that our calendars don’t tell us the moon’s phases, &c. So I tried to find a calendar for iCal that would have this information and learned some strange new (to me) words, and new meanings for old words. Apparently as well as waxing and waning moons, there are gibbous, disseminating and balsamic moons. Y’all knew that, didn’t you?
Grumbly, you mean Superperson again. You do know he or she doesn’t really exist?
Perhaps the Daily Mail should produce a plan-ahead calender to notify us of forthcoming earthquakes.
Of course, Catannea we ALL knew this terms, especially myself and my cat. We’re very good in science…
( ;-) that’s the biggest lie you can hear from here)
Wikip. tells me that ‘balsamic moon’ is an astrology term: “The balsamic moon is said to relate to one’s commitment to destiny”. I’m not sure I’m committed to destiny at all.
a couple of loony things about moon terms:
“quarter moon” means what I mean by a (waxing) half moon, i.e. when one half of the disk is illuminated, about a week before full (one quarter of the way through the cycle from new to new)
“crescent” etymologically means growing, so that by rights it ought to cover waxing sliver, waxing half, and waxing gibbous, while in practice it covers waxing sliver and waning sliver
You may chatter about the Greenwich meridian, Crown, but did you know that – on the sly, without a word to me – the buggers have done in GMT?
“Coordinated Universal Time (abbreviated UTC) is the time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. ..Leap seconds are used to allow UTC to closely track UT1, which is mean solar time at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Since the difference between UTC and UT1 is not allowed to exceed 0.9 seconds, if high precision is not required, the general term Universal Time (UT) may be used. In casual use, when fractions of a second are not important, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) can be considered equivalent to UTC or UT1. Saying “GMT” often implies either UTC or UT1 when used within informal or casual contexts. In technical contexts, usage of “GMT” is avoided; the unambiguous terminology “UTC” or “UT1″ is preferred.” Just look at that Orwellian passive! To my amusement I found an American site that was being all “scientific” by using “UTC” but, laughably, was using with it the 12-hour clock with appended “a.m.” and “p.m.”
But why, I hear you cry, is Coordinated Universal Time abbreviated to UTC, which is obviously neither English nor French? Well , WKPD continues with:
Source Initials Words
English CUT Coordinated Universal Time
French TUC Temps Universel Coordonné
compromise:
unofficial
English UTC “Universal Time, Coordinated”
That’s a shocking and sad story, Dearie. I thought the whole point about hours and minutes was that they weren’t universal. The world is run by nitwits, I wonder what it cost to make that change. For me it will always be GMT – except of course that most of the time it isn’t. I suppose they’ll be changing the name of the Greenwich meridian to something more bilingual like the Universal Non-Equator. Actually, I remember reading that the Greenwich meridian was never very popular in France. The French (I can’t remember who, probably Napoleon, he was very good at maths) wanted to have it running through Paris.
The only thing I think of as balsamic is vinegar, although the Norwegians use the word balsam for the monumentally stupid English term “hair conditioner”. Am I in a bad mood today, or what?
I was asked recently to justify the term “hair conditioner”. I said that its job was conditioning surfaces, and that the surfaces in question happened to be the surfaces of hairs. Remarkably, this was accepted and the conversation moved on.
I woke up this morning realizing that that ellipse explanation of mine was bunk, and now I’ve spent most of the day trying not to spill my workday on figuring out for myself how it all adds up. As Ø says, the moon obviously orbits the earth once a month, so it’s also at its closest once a month.
How this translates to a longer period for the combined effect is quite interesting. The combination of the 27 day orbit and the 29 day phase cycle gives a 27 x 29/(29-27) = ~381,5 day period for when the two cycles catch up. When they do, however, they aren’t at the same point in the cycle as the first time (similarly: when the arms of a clock catch up the first time, it’s a different time of day) but halfway through the cycle — 13,5 cycles of the moon phases, 14,5 orbits.
The interesting part here is the decimals. If these were exact numbers, every second combined cycle would remove them, and two combined cycles would be the period of the “super-moon” (similarly for the clock: every eleventh combined cycle removes the decimals and the two arms coincide at twelve o’clock). But nothing in the universe is perfect, so they’re not. That means that there’s another cycle on top of that, describing how much the full moon misses the target.
I don’t think we need to go that way. Rather, it’s good enough to say that with a frequency of once per 783 days the full moon and the closest point on the orbit coincide within a day. The chance of hitting within one hour of the target (a two-hour interval) is 1/12 of that, i.e. on average every 25,7 years. A hit within 90 minutes is happening once every 17,2 years, so I suppose what we had now was a hit of that order.
But I also remember something about the moon’s orbit varying in 18 year cycles.Maybe the shape of the ellipse is varying (like when you hold a pendula in your hand and its movement gradually becomes elliptic, then circular, and then elliptic the other way). Maybe the sun pulls so that the ellipse itself rotates around the earth. If it’s the latter, it would probably interfere with the calculations. Never mind, I’d have to cheat to find out.
With maths professors and Martians around, I’m sure any further misconceptions will be shot down.
Oh well, about the solitary figure angle, it seems that when Friedrich went out to sketch the moon, the custom in any case was to bring along a friend or two.
Thanks for that, Trond. I admire your skill at figuring it out.
A prosaic response to your Casper David Friedrich, but you certainly can enlarge that picture. What good quality reproduction.
Don’t trust it, I see it as a school excercise. The Bad Guide Academy, Galactic Department.
Trond: you’re an admirable professor. I think I almost understand it, and this is a lot to say (I kind of hear “crrshhh” or white noise when someone tries to explain science to me)
i did not know you unfriended me at FB, sorry, if i did something wrong that made you to do that
You didn’t do anything wrong. I unfriended you because I never heard from you any more. Sorry about that. I can only remember ever de-friending one person, and that was a guy who had the same name and birthday as me. I de-friended him because I didn’t know him and it was kind of confusing having him around. I’d be delighted to be your friend again, read, if you’ll have me back. But you should make a comment here now and then so that I know you still exist.
i unfriended several people for the same reason recently, huh
i thought all my status updates are showing everywhere at my friends’ news feeds because I changed the settings as you suggested and writing on other people’s walls i almost never do because that feels like too much of like intrusion from my side, though i like when people interact with me every which way
okay, from now on i’ll bombard you with my links :) [with your permission and within limits, or maybe you mean here on your blog?]
Bombard me anywhere. I’ve only recently been using facebook, I don’t know how long I’ll keep it up. I changed my settings, but I still don’t hear from some people.
It’s time someone introduced a web service called Faceslap. Even I might join.
hi, dearieme!
sorry, i didn’t answer you on LH, perhaps i was wrong, perhaps really in the Eastern Europe their peasants were not aware of their self-identifying language, nationalities or ethnic identities, what i know about them
just if it was me the next thing i know about me after that i am a daughter of my parents , is that i am of this “given” (self-identifying) nationality and i talk on this particular language and was aware of it from the very young ages, so it seemed people won’t be that different from me whatever was their background even if a hundred years ago
denying them even their self-identity seemed to me something similar to nabokov’s wondering about a homemaid, what was the difference for her to wash the floors or doing something else, i forgot, perhaps gardening? during tsarism or bolshevism, that would have been all the same for her etc.
Or Faceoff. Wikipedia says that the expression “faceoff” comes from hockey.
I can see why they had to change “puck off”.
And what do you think of “Facefoot”? It would be a social network for dictators and authoritarian powerful people who enjoy smashing our faces to the floor.
Or it also could be a place where we can go when we are furious with someone but don’t want to destroy our peaceful and lovable reputation among our friends.
That’s it: it would be like a safety valve. We all need it sometimes, I think.
Hiya, Read. I remember reading once that the sharpest dialect boundary in W Europe was that between Scotland and England: far sharper, the writer said, than that between Germany and the Netherlands, for instance. He attributed it simply to the Scotland/England border being the longest established in W Europe. One you accept how young many borders are, with the corollary that many places have recently been swapped around in the matter of which “country” they are part of, the notion that peasants might find a lot of ambiguity in questions of nationality seems pretty reasonable to me. It’s well worth reading Graham Robb’s “The Discovery of France”: it shows how recent the idea of being French is for huge tracts of France, and how recent speaking French is too.
Not satisfied with running google, Julia now plans a social network for dictators. Is this a Zeitgeisty thing, would it include recent ex-dictators?
Dearie and anyone else, I love getting book recommendations, especially when they’re from people I know. Please keep it up!
would it include recent ex-dictators?
Yes, of course.
They’ll need it more (withdrawal symptoms)
In the course of the sparkling data flow concerning the failing reactors, it was commented by one “expert” that a particular fuel used in one of the reactors was called “mox”.
When asked what this meant, he said that it is actually an euphemism, as the proper term — an abbreviation for plutonium oxide — would be “pox”.
“But people don’t like the sound of plutonium very much, and then too there were the unfortunate epidemiological connotations.”
(Well, he didn’t say that latter sentence, but perhaps ought to have.)
I like dearie’s Faceslap idea quite a lot, in fact. Couldn’t that be worked into Julia’s Justice-for-ex-Dictators plan?
Not really, tom: it’s “mox” because it’s “mixed oxide” fuel, consisting of pox + uox.
dearie,
Well, it seems from here that having the plutonium diminished to the role of “part of the mix” is perhaps a little like having the Devil in for friendly drinks and expecting him to blend.
A congenial fellow who works in “the labs” hereabouts suggests (very much in private) that the stuff’s called “MOX” and not “POX” for very good public relations reasons, having to do with the popular reaction to having it sink in that your happy home is being heated heated by second-hand weapons-grade fissile material, which has a half-life of Forever.
There has indeed been some ongoing debate on the NIX/POX issue.
Plutonium is the evil genius inside the genie in the bottle, and anything done to give its “civilian uses” a good or even neutral name seems to me a bit problematic. Let a pox be called a POX and have done with it, I say.
There’s nothing especially horrible about plutonium in reactors in the radioactive sense – the problem is potentially that the stuff is very toxic in the chemical sense, so you really don’t want to scatter it about. And of course it’s not weapons grade, it’s very much diluted, and if you wanted to extract it to make a weapon you’d face the tricky business that the stuff that’s been run through a reactor is now accompanied by all sorts of radioactive muck that makes the extraction even more hazardous. If making yourself a plutonium bomb were so easy, why did Pakistan go to so much trouble to steal the design of gas centrifuges so that it could make a uranium bomb? Ditto Iran? Nope, you’re on the wrong track here.
Dearie, do you think nuclear reactors are a good idea? I never know what to think about this. They seem like an alternative to fossil fuels if they’re safe, and some people are saying that the Japan disaster only shows how well things can be controlled when something goes wrong. But on the other hand, etc.
I’m resolutely anti-anti-nuclear – that’s to say, I find the opposition to them to be routinely hysterical, dishonest and ignorant. Not so long ago, much of that opposition was paid for by the Soviet Union. But to be pro-nuclear is a step too far for me, for the following reasons. (1) Though I can believe that they are economic, I’ve yet to see the evidence. (2) I’ve never been employed by the industry and so lack all the “feel” for them that an insider might have. (3) There’s no end to human folly. I cite (a) the design of the Chernobyl reactor and the madcap experiment on it that went wrong. (I do, though, enjoy the irony of all the Soviet agents, fellow travellers and useful idiots who protested about the far superior Western designs, while keeping shtum about the Russian horror show.) I further cite (b) The desire to put them in dangerous places – heavens, I’d be a bit reluctant to put gas-fired stations in Japan, or hydro dams, never mind nukes.
I’m not really qualified to make a judgment, but I feel I ought to have an opinion. I thought that if that dreadful prig George Monoblot in the Guardian was supporting nuclear – and he doesn’t normally like anything, except making people feel guilty – then perhaps I was wrong to be against it. But maybe not. Some seemingly trustworthy people with no axe to grind seem to like it, you know.
I can’t help but think that coal-fired stations would have been a better bet for Japan. For us, nukes might be a perfectly reasonable bet.
Perhaps they haven’t got any coal. They went for nuclear because they didn’t want other countries messing them about. That’s an argument in favour: if nukes fuel our electricity, the first world (do we still use that term?) wouldn’t have to go to war every time someone threatened its oil supply. However, it’s only an argument in favour if the nukes don’t kill us. Some people seem to miss that point.
I’ve read that crude oil can be synthesized from plant detritus by the application of sufficient pressure and heat. Suppose atomic power plants were used to manufacture oil ? Then our energy supplies would not be dependent on the Ayrabs, and we would even put them out of business.
To earn a bit of money, they would be eager to rent out their uninhabitable deserts as nuclear waste depots. Seems like a satisfactory solution all round. I can’t imagine why no one has thought of it before.
There are lots of things like that that no one’s thought of before. That’s why blogs were invented.
Prince Charles, being so green, fuels his 40-year-old Aston Martin with wine from his estate in Gloucestershire. I think it says something about the wine (and I don’t mean “it’s so versatile”).
Artur, I wondered if you’d come across a 1987 documentary called Hotet (Threat) by the Swedish filmmaker Stefan Jarl. It looks into the impact of the Chernobyl disaster upon the traditional render herding people of Lappland. A difficult film to watch, but very powerful, and tragic in many respects. I’ve been thinking about it lately again, a lot.
dearie, your views on this matter are interesting and certainly pointed.
“For us, nukes might be a perfectly reasonable bet.”
The sentence might make some shred of sense, if: (1) “us” had some actual meaning (I can’t locate a plausible “we” behind it — is “us” a generalization that includes the particular population of some geographic or economic station that can be specified, as, say, Europe, the West, or the back of someone’s potting shed?); (2) “reasonable” were stretched to mean “well, up until just lately it has appeared we can get away with it”; and (3) a bet, as indeed many divine powers have been presumed to opine, were the appropriate way to dispose the fates of these silly playthings, humans and their potential offspring.
The GE designed Mark IV reactors at Fukushima have 23 siblings of similar design still cooking in the US. At least two senior engineers who worked on installation and operation of these units have now gone on record to say all these units share the same drastic design flaws. Which would “reasonably” be expected to introduce that element of gamble into the mind of anyone who’s been conscious the past two weeks.
GE owns 60 percent of Hitachi America, which is responsible for the cooling systems of the Fukushima units.
TEPCO, the power company, was ramping up those reactors to run as hot and long as they could go, with far too little downtime, virtually no ongoing inspections, and an enormous store of the sort of human complacency and arrogance that are always necessary to make great profits over long periods of time out of terrible enterprises like this one.
Human error and shortsightedness multiplied by the small but real possibility of major areal electrical failures, due to various causes, in any location, at any time, and poof, all bets are off, even if the plants are made by “gods”.
(Remembering the Longfellow bit our philosopher architect Wittgenstein so liked, about the gods being in the house.)
Might not a major global reduction in power consumption, however utopian and cloudy that thought or dream, at least offer a way of reducing the demand so as to incur less threat from the multiple dangers of continually having to increase the supply?
Tom, Dearie is a scientist who taught at your alma mater, Cambridge, until his recent retirement. He still lives in East Angular, as he said the other day, and I think he was referring to Britain. I’ll take a look at the film. One of our neighbours is a biologist, and she told my wife on the bus the other day that she had tested a dried mushroom from Ukraine within the last two or three years and found 20 times the normal radioactivity. Apparently this happens a lot with dried things.
“…traditional render herding people” was of course meant to read “traditional reindeer herding people” — apologies for that.
Without having known I had already suspected the wise and esteemed dearie to be an expert in an area where fools perpetually rush in; and as my own Cambridge college was populated largely by scientists, I long ago became accustomed to experiencing and acknowledging a severe case of layman’s folly.
Then again, there are scientists all round, and some of those in my acquaintance who work at the Livermore research labs, and thus would appear qualified to penetrate the clouds of confusion around the issue, seem to share many of the same sorts of doubts the public has been expressing in regard to what is happening in Japan.
Thirty years ago, working as a journalist, I had an assignment that involved investigating the safety procedures at a nuclear weapons production plant in Colorado. This entailed research, interviews with scientists and plant personnel, etc. They say a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That may be what I obtained during that work.
Tom my apologies, I didn’t know you’d researched nuclear weapons safety. You clearly know much more than I do about nuclear energy, not that that’s so hard.
I have a physicist friend at Livermore too, a very okay guy who would be the first to say if he thought nuclear energy was inherently a bad idea, but so far I’ve never been able to get him to do so.
Well, I should probably relay the helpful fact that, when I interviewed the public relations director of the nuclear weapons productions plant on the issue of plant safety, he assured me there was really nothing for the public to be concerned about.
(I believe it was his job to say that.)
Doing p.r. for nukes – now there’s a job I’d never considered.
Well, with some controversial causes and figures, that sort of work is uphill all the way, calling for nothing less than a master publicist.