Tonight, the Chinese will celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋节 (also known as Mooncake Festival). This is the time for family get-together, enjoying mooncake and tea, while the children playing with lanterns under the full moon.
The Chinese culture regards the autumnal equinox as mid-autumn and thus the Mid-Autumn Festival. In the Chinese calendar, it is the day that marks the full moon (Day 15) in the 8th Month (八月十五), and it’s usually falls a few days to weeks around the Autumnal Equinox. But this year, it falls exactly on the same day, which is today. In a very technical term, the full moon reaches maximum illumination six hours after the equinox. According to Science@NASA, there hasn’t been a comparable coincidence since Sept 23, 1991, when the difference was about 10 hours, and it won’t happen again until the year 2029.
I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! 中秋节快乐! And while you are at the Moon, don’t forget our big brother Jupiter dazzling nearby, who is also putting its best show in more that a decade.
In simple words it means go and drag everyone out to see the Moon.
The Moon is our nearest celestial neighbour; it’s the biggest object you can see in the night sky. With just the naked eyes, we are able to make out the “seas” (maria) – darker regions and the highlands – lighter regions on the Moon. Through a telescope, the view is just breathtaking! I never get bored looking at the Moon, either with aided or unaided eyes. It is just beautiful. Just look at the seas, the craters, the impact rays, the mountains, the valleys (what? you don’t know that’s so many things to see on the Moon?).
Visit the International Observe the Moon Night (InOMN) website to learn about how this event was inspired, find information and activities about the Moon and missions to the Moon, information about InOMN events at InOMN partner institutions, find out how to host your own event, and more!
The InOMN is also organising a photo contest to shoot the Moon. Take a photo of the Moon between August 24 and September 23, 2010 that falls into one of three (or all three!) categories: landscape, wide-angle, or narrow-angle. Don’t worry if you are just a beginner, because the contest is further separated into “beginners” and “experienced”. Visit the website for more info.
Astronomy is my passion. Why? I can’t really explain why, just that I got a very strong feeling towards it. You don’t really need a reason to love something, do you?
So whenever someone asked me this question, I always messed up the answers (although I had been asked this question many times). Today, I came across this article “5 reasons why astronomy is cool” that I would like to share with you all. I think at least this will help me to structure my answers more properly the next time I’m asked this question again.
And I just love the first reason that resonates well with me:
This photo of a sunspot is the most detailed ever obtained in visible light, thanks to the technology of adaptive optics. The NST has 97 actuators that made up the deformable mirror to correct for atmospheric distortion. By the summer next year, the observatory will have upgraded the current adaptive optics system to one utilizing a 349 actuator deformable mirror.
Next, is from SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory). If you are a regular reader of Spaceweather.com, you’ll notice that in the past few months, almost all of the amazing solar images are from SDO. What to do, we are talking about the “Hubble for the Sun” here!
Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory
This prominence was produced when departing sunspot 1105 erupted as it was turning away from us, producing a C3-class solar flare and hurled a bright CME (coronal mass ejection) into space. Click here for movie.
The eruption taken in the extreme UV was combined into a multiwavelength movie that did not show the familiar Sun that we are used to see. We are not able to see the action with our eyes anyway, because the extreme UV colours are far beyond the limits of our vision.
Next story is regarding a plan to visit the Sun. Last week, NASA had selected five key science investigations for the Solar Probe+ spacecraft, planned to launch no later than 2018. Solar Probe+ is going where no spacecraft has gone before, it will “touch, taste and smell” the Sun (to quote Lika Guhathakurta, Solar Probe+ program scientist at NASA HQ). It will plunge directly into the atmosphere of the Sun, aiming to solve some of the biggest mysteries of solar physics.
What will we find there? Some answers to our long-standing questions about our star, I guess, and definitely more questions and puzzles that we had never think of.
This book, Postcards from the Edge of the Universe, is based on the science carried out by a hand-picked selection of the best bloggers from the Cosmic Diary, one of the 12 Cornerstone projects of the International Year of Astronomy 2009.
From sunspots to black holes, planets around other stars, supernovae and dark matter, Postcards from the Edge of the Universe unveils the mysteries of today’s research, looking at cutting-edge astronomy from around the world. 24 frontline astronomers from all corners of the globe explain their science in accessible language in articles edited by veteran communicators Lee Pullen, Mariana Barrosa and Lars Lindberg Christensen.
The best part is that this book is available as ebook for free download here. You can also send e-postcards to family and friends at the website. This 126-page book is really beautiful, I strongly recommend you download it.
I’m old-fashioned (although I’m not old). I don’t enjoy reading from the monitor. I love printed books and magazines. I can only fully enjoy an article if it’s in hardcopy form (sorry trees… but I did tried not to print out everything I want to read, unless those that are really interesting).
Having said that, there are these things in the new digital age that I truly enjoy – videos and audio podcasts. Videos will give a totally different experience of our universe, and sometimes, having someone telling you a cosmic story and showing you the pictures at the same time is so enjoyable. And audio podcasts are really a time saver – I never again wasted my time waiting for a bus/train, driving in a car or staring out from a long-journey bus watching the trees racing by.
So what I’ve done here is collected some of the podcasts that I follow into a page (at the sidebar). (Although there is still a lot of great podcasts out there, limited time prevented me from enjoying them all.)
My Dark Sky 
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