Phases | MoONITIS

THE MOON’S “BLUE” LAST QUARTER PHASE EXPLAINED. HINT: IT’S NOT CHEESE RELATED.

As the moon moves around Earth in its monthly orbit, there are four points at which it is in exact geometry with the sun and Earth: new moon, first quarter, full moon, and last quarter.

These are the four points at which the Earth, moon and sun are in a straight line, or the sun and moon form a 90-degree angle as seen from Earth.

At new moon, the moon is between Earth and sun, so we are trying to see the moon’s dark side in front of the brilliant sun. We can never see the moon at new moon because of the bright sunlight, except on the rare instances when the moon is directly in front of the sun and we get a solar eclipse. Because of the tilt of the moon’s orbit, most of the time it passes either above or below the sun, but still close enough that it is lost in the sun’s glare. [Moon Photography Tips from Astrophotographers: A Visual Guide]

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INSANELY DETAILED 3-D GLOBE OF THE MOON SHOWS EVERY DIMPLE BECAUSE KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR MOON DIMPLES IS VERY IMPORTANT

Via: Wired

FOUR YEARS AGO, fresh out of graduate school at the Royal College of Art in London, Oscar Lhermitte stumbled across some high-resolution images of the moon. The images came from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, which launched in 2009, and they showed swaths of the lunar surface in extraordinary detail. Lhermitte, a designer who says he’s “obsessed with anything to do with science and astronomy,” began to wonder if he could use that data to create a three-dimensional model of the moon—i.e., a lunar globe.

Continue reading “INSANELY DETAILED 3-D GLOBE OF THE MOON SHOWS EVERY DIMPLE BECAUSE KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR MOON DIMPLES IS VERY IMPORTANT”