Birds Silhouetted against SuperMoon, photo © Don Kittle

Why wait until Tuesday when I can post some of my favorite SuperMoon pictures today?? (Especially since my own lame iPod photo of the SuperMoon was… lame.) Above, a superb shot with birds in flight by Don Kittle; below, SuperMoon above Seattle (by Liem Bahneman), and San Francisco (by David Yu.)

Photo of "Supermoon" as it rises over Seattle on May 5, 2012, photo © Liem Bahneman

SuperMoon rising above San Francisco, photo © David Yu

Interesting plans are afoot, to use the Moon’s surface as a mirror for observation:

This mottled landscape showing the impact crater Tycho is among the most violent-looking places on our Moon. Astronomers didn’t aim NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study Tycho, however. The image was taken in preparation to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun’s face on June 5-6.

Hubble cannot look at the Sun directly, so astronomers are planning to point the telescope at the Earth’s moon, using it as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the small fraction of the light that passes through Venus’s atmosphere. Imprinted on that small amount of light are the fingerprints of the planet’s atmospheric makeup.

These observations will mimic a technique that is already being used to sample the atmospheres of giant planets outside our solar system passing in front of their stars. In the case of the Venus transit observations, astronomers already know the chemical makeup of Venus’s atmosphere, and that it does not show signs of life on the planet. But the Venus transit will be used to test whether this technique will have a chance of detecting the very faint fingerprints of an Earth-like planet, even one that might be habitable for life, outside our solar system that similarly transits its own star. Venus is an excellent proxy because it is similar in size and mass to our planet.

The astronomers will use an arsenal of Hubble instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, to view the transit in a range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. During the transit, Hubble will snap images and perform spectroscopy, dividing the sunlight into its constituent colors, which could yield information about the makeup of Venus’s atmosphere.

Pretty fascinating stuff!

Moon rocket illustration by Jack Coggins, from "Spaceship to the Moon", 1952

…that’s some engine! I mean, really, that is ONE FAT ROCKET. Wowza.

Photo by David Parmet, backyardstargazer.com

This gorgeous photo was taken by my friend David Parmet. On an iPhone. Can you believe it?!? The man has SKILLZ. Enjoy.

Oh, and Happy Yuri’s Night, everyone!

A Japanese moon-lander concept, circa 1971 for your Friday. Image via x-ray delta one.

Image Credit & Copyright: M. Taha Ghouchkanlu

A beautiful photo for your Friday.

Also known as the Moon’s ashen glow, Earthshine is Earthlight illuminating the Moon’s night side. Taken on Nowruz, the March 20 equinox, from Esfahan, Iran, planet Earth, this telescopic image captures strong Earthshine from an old Moon. The darker earthlit disk is in the arms of a bright sunlit crescent. But the view from the Moon would have been enchanting too. When the Moon appears in Earth’s sky as a slender crescent, a dazzlingly bright, nearly full Earth would be seen from the lunar surface. The Earth’s brightness due to reflected sunlight is known to be strongly influenced by cloud cover. Still, a description of Earthshine, in terms of sunlight reflected by Earth’s oceans in turn illuminating the Moon’s dark surface, was written 500 years ago by Leonardo da Vinci.

I admit, I’m a sucker for space toys, especially awesome retro space toys, like the Ideal Astro Base shown above (buy it on Etsy! It looks like a blast!! No, I’m not being punny on purpose.)

Astro Base was a toy made by the Ideal company in the early 1960′s. The toy ran on 4 D Cell batteries. Other than a power switch, it had several features that includes the following modes of operation:

Astro Scope: Switch to Astro Scope and a scene of spaceships, rockets, and jets rotates through a view finder just below a radar dome on the top of the toy. A button on the console let the user ‘fire’ at objects seen on the screen, which would pause the rotating images and emit a machine-gun style sound.

Space Lock: A crane emerges out of the hatch on one side of the toy. This crane has a hoist operation that can be used to raise or lower a plastic astronaut figure, or other objects that the user may have that can be connected to the hook at the end of a chain. The main purpose of this crane is to insert or remove the astronaut from a scout car.

Scout Car: The scout car can be plugged into a port on the console and controlled by a two position switch marked Turn and Drive that can actually be used to steer the vehicle with a bit of practice. The scout car also has missiles that can be launched.

Ideal made two variations of the Astro Base. The original all-red version featured a lighted Astro Scope that illuminated the pictures spinning around the Astro Scope. Ideal Toys discontinued this version and offered the common red and white version.
— CollectToys.net

I also liked this Moon Patrol XT-978 Tank, because I’m amused at the mental image of tooling around the lunar surface… in a tank. Any tank, really, but especially one with bodacious tail-fins!

Credit: E.L. Trouvelot, New York Public Library

These Victorian-era illustrations of astronomical subjects by E.L. Trouvelot are beautifully detailed. Check out the whole set here.

Credit: E.L. Trouvelot, New York Public Library

A group of sunspots and veiled spots observed on June 17, 1875 at 7:30 a.m. Sunspots are magnetic regions on the sun, which appear in images as dark spots and whose magnetic field strengths thousands of times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field.

I have no proof, but somehow I doubt the Girl’s Own Paper from February 1958 had moon rockets on it. (If such a Paper existed, that is.) Needless to say, I would have bought this one, were I there at the time — just one shilling, can’t be beat! Image via x-ray delta one.

A terrific Moon rocket from 1930. Off to the Moon? If only, if only….