A supercut of huge movie moons by Ariel Avissar, set to the most appropriate tune.
Tag Archives: lunar
Ring Of Fire
atSunrise doesn’t normally look like this.
Because the moon’s not normally in the way, as it was on the morning of May 10th, 2013 when seen from Western Australia. To wit:
At times, it would be hard for the uninformed to understand what was happening. In an annular eclipse, the Moon is too far from the Earth to block the entire Sun, and at most leaves a ring of fire where sunlight pours out around every edge of the Moon. The featured time-lapse video also recorded the eclipse through the high refraction of the Earth’s atmosphere just above the horizon, making the unusual rising Sun and Moon appear also flattened. As the video continues on, the Sun continues to rise, and the Sun and Moon begin to separate. This weekend, a new annular solar eclipse will occur, visible from central Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and a narrow band across Asia, with much of Earth’s Eastern hemisphere being able to see a partial solar eclipse.
(Video: Colin Legg & Geoff Sims; Music: Peter Nanasi)
Quarter Moon
atAmateur astronomer Andrew McCarthy’s stunningly detailed image of the first quarter moon of 2020 – 100,000 images composited into one. To wit:
The natural colours (sez he) of the moon were brought out here with minor saturation adjustments, but those colours are completely real and what you could see if your eyes were more sensitive. I find the colour really helps tell the story of how some of these features formed billions of years ago.
McCarthy sells his images as wallpaper and hi res prints here.
Dormammu!
atNo, it’s an equally strange lunar corona over Turin. To wit:
Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Moon is seen through thin clouds. The effect is created by the quantum mechanical diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized water droplets in an intervening but mostly-transparent cloud. Since light of different colors has different wavelengths, each color diffracts differently. Lunar Coronae are one of the few quantum mechanical colour effects that can be easily seen with the unaided eye. The featured lunar corona was captured around full Moon above Turin, Italy in 2014. Similar coronae that form around the Sun are usually harder to see because of the Sun’s great brightness.
A conceptual fuel cell electric vehicle envisaged by Toyota and the Japan Aerospce Exploration Agency (JAXA) designed for two passengers (four at a pinch) that’s good for up to 10,000 dusty kilometres of lunar exploration.