If you missed yesterday’s blue moon, don’t worry, it will still look full tonight too. And as I should also have mentioned, it’s a micromoon (the opposite of a supermoon). The moon is at apogee, or as far from us as it can get. Right now, that’s about 251,000 miles away.
Tomorrow night is the second full moon of May, which makes it a blue moon. They are rare but not very, as they happen every two or three years. The next one won’t happen until December 2028.
People who step outside at the end of the month to catch a glimpse of the rare lunar event should also be able to spot Venus and Jupiter in the western sky about an hour after sunset. Meanwhile, early risers should be able to see Mars and Saturn in the eastern sky about an hour before daybreak.
I wanted to let you know a day ahead of time in case you, like me, like to have these things on your calendar!
Some space veterans seemed to find this scent quite pleasant. “It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent of describing the palate sensations of some new food that ‘tastes like chicken.’
Yes, these are the things I find interesting about space. Not the math (with apologies to all my math teachers ever) or the physics (with apologies to all the classes I never took), but the lived experience.
When I’m thinking about a story and need to ground the reader, this sort of information is useful. What would it feel like, what would it taste like?
Recently, Neil deGrasse Tyson visited Stephen Colbert to talk about aliens and his new book Take Me To Your Leader: Perspectives On Your First Alien Encounter. He discussed aliens, why you probably shouldn’t shake hands, and how they might mirror what they see of humanity.
It made me think of the story I wrote on that topic, and how I hope that humanity does more good than not. I’ve re-posted before but I like the story, so here it is again. Click through for the full piece.
And when those parachutes came out, when the mains came out, it was like God himself led us down to the water. And I had a big old grin on my face. It was intense. It went from intense to pure elation.
If you are curious about what it’s like to pilot in space, the difference between a touchscreen controller and stick-and-throttle hand controllers, or the “very intense” 13 minutes and 36 seconds of reentry, read on.
I was!
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NASA/Jim Ross (left to right, Jeremy Hansen, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman)
NASA reminded me that we have a new, if transitory, neighbor in the skies overhead. The comet PanSTARRS is making a quick visit and tonight is the closest it will come to the sun.
This is a good weekend for northern hemisphere comet watchers to try to catch PanSTARRS an hour or so before sunrise, as the comet grows brighter approaching its perihelion on April 19. On April 26 the comet makes its closest approach to our fair planet but by then will be difficult to see in the solar glare. Good views of this comet PanSTARRS in late April and early May will be from the southern hemisphere.
And to save you from tracking down one of the many (many) space-themed Artemis links I’ve put up over the past couple of days, you can watch tonight’s homecoming here starting at 6:30pm EDT!
Each morning, the flight crew is awoken by a song, hand-picked by Mission Control specialists back home on Earth. The long-standing practice keeps astronauts on schedule and connects them to the rest of humanity.
The crew is scheduled to splash down tomorrow evening (April 10th), off the coast of San Diego. Stay tuned for that, and for the final entry in their wake-up playlist!
Since my recent posts have spent a lot of time in space, let’s take a slight break from the nonfiction drama of NASA’s Artemis II mission and shift over to the fictional world of space adventure.
In his books, Andy Weir (The Martian) works hard to bring scientific accuracy to his fiction. The challenge is balancing the demands of a thrilling story with the science that grounds it in reality.
While “Project Hail Mary” has its share of explosions and catastrophes, it’s the thinking that’s thrilling. Grace and Rocky must come together, with tools and whiteboards, craft and ingenuity, to solve a seemingly insoluble problem. They make mistakes, but they learn from those mistakes and from each other.
… when I walked out of a recent preview screening of the film adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2021 science fiction novel Project Hail Mary, I had tears of joy in my eyes. The filmmakers had done justice not just to the original story, but also to the science at the heart of it.
From NASA, with lots of interesting subsidiary links:
Let NASA shed some light: Explore the resources below to learn the science facts fueling the science fiction.
(Wait, Tau Ceti was also featured in fiction by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson? And was the setting for Barbarella? This planet gets around!)
The final assessment of the science? Not perfect, but good. And precisely accurate or not, this promises to be another very entertaining movie. (I’ve read the book but haven’t seen the film yet. Yes, I am a little behind the curve!)
Since we’re here, how about an article on the movie as a climate parable? (warning, spoilers!)
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