In honor of the first full moon of 2007, I am blatantly ripping off today's Astronomy Picture of the Day because it was so cool. [OK, not a total ripoff - I used a different image of the moon and I'm throwing in some extra links.] The moon orbits the earth in an elliptical orbit, not a circular one. Since the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant, the full moon varies in apparent size. This can be easily seen in this series of images showing twenty consecutive full moons. The slight wobble you see is called libration. Each Full Moon of the year has a traditional name (or two, or three). Once in a blue moon, there is a blue moon, like the one we'll see this spring.
I enjoy looking at and photographing the moon during all of its phases. One of the quiet pleasures of winter is to take a walk in the woods under a full moon. Without the leaf canopy, the moonlight filters through the bare branches and lights your path. Everything is still and quiet. The stars twinkle in the cold, crisp air. Lovely.
Enjoy the Wolf Moon, y'all.
7 comments:
Last night about 2AM I did just that - I took a walk up to the top of my hill to look at the moon, and walked some through the woods. Beautiful. We take too much for granted because it seems that we're always hurrying to do something or other.
Of course, my wife thought I was nuts.
It never looks as cool in the pictures I take. Surely, that's the fault of the camera. ;P
I wanted to take a moon picture for the blog last night, but PDM wouldn't cooperate. Just kidding! I couldn't take my own pic because it was too cloudy.
My pics always come out much smaller too... darn cameras anyway. Of course I could just pony up and get a SLR, but what would be the sense in that?
I love the Astronomy Picture of the Day. I troll it frequently for pix to put on my desktop. I lose myself in some of them. They're so beautiful.
This was a most informative post. As my friend Pierre used to say "Tonight I will go to bed less stupid." Kind of the French way of saying, "Learn something new every day."
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