Gene Cernan on the Moon during the final EVA of the Apollo 17 mission, Dec. 13, 1972 (NASA/JSC scan)
On December 14, 1972, at about 5:40 a.m. GMT, Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Andrew “Gene” Cernan returned to the lunar module Challenger after the end of the third mission EVA to join Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, completing nearly two and a half days of surface operations within the Taurus-Littrow site and officially becoming the last human to set foot upon the lunar surface. No one has returned since, and to this day the 80-year-old Cernan still holds the title of “last man on the Moon.”
If that’s not the perfect setup for a documentary film, I don’t know what is. Luckily for us there’s one in the works.
“The Last Man on the Moon,” from UK-based Mark Stewart Productions, tells the story of Gene Cernan and his accomplishments against the backdrop of the Apollo era, when superpowers competed for dominance in space and hotshot flyboys became international heroes. With firsthand accounts from Cernan himself and his family, along with several other astronauts and NASA celebrities, it’s an emotional and intimate account of America’s last lunar voyage.
Watch the trailer below:
According to IMDB the 99-minute documentary directed by Mark Craig is slated for release in the UK (and hopefully U.S.!) sometime this year, although an exact date isn’t listed. There have been advance screenings very recently, at some of which Cernan was present for Q&A sessions. Some viewers are calling it “the best space documentary they have seen” so needless to say I’m pretty excited about it!
Saturn heading behind the Moon on May 14, 2014. Credit and copyright: Silveryway on Flickr.
Observers in Australia and New Zealand had a special treat this week: watching Saturn disappear behind the Moon during an event called an occultation. (You can read all the details of how and why this happens here in our preview article.) Catching an event like this with a camera is tricky… the bright Moon can wash out the comparatively tiny (from our vantage point) planet Saturn. But here, several astrophotographers had success. Above is a nice view from Silveryway on Flickr.
An animated gif of the occulation of Saturn by the Moon on May 14, 2014. Credit and copyright: Ian Musgrave.
Ian Musgrave from Australia used a 4″ Newtonian telescope, with a “Point and Shoot” Canon IXUS attached with inifinty to infinity focussing, 3xZoom, and a 25mm eye piece. You can see his entire set of images on his website here.
Widefield view of the occultation of Saturn on May 14, 2014. Credit and copyright: Ian Musgrave.
Peter Lake, also from Australia not only took images of the event, but also did a live Hangout on G+.
“Live hangouts and driving a telescope live is a tricky business,” Peter wrote on his website. “I lost focus playing around trying to improve the image due to the thin cloud.” He added that the night sky wasn’t ideal that evening. “The full moon was shining through thin clouds, washing out a bit of the detail.”
Saturn getting ready to head behind the Moon. Credit and copyright: Peter Lake.
You can watch a replay of Peter’s Hangout below:
Saturn and the Moon diffusion. The clouds drifted across the sky, Saturn and the Moon shone bright, the view from the UK. Credit and copyright: Sarah and Simon Fisher.
Sarah and Simon Fisher from the UK captured this “diffused” view of Saturn close the Moon on the evening of May 13, 2014.
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Where did Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos come from? How did they end up in orbit around Mars? This cool video from the folks at Kurzgesagt answers the most-oft asked questions about these mini moons.
You should also check out their other wonderful videos, like the one about our own Moon, below, which explains how big our Moon really is. The answer might surprise you.
Simulation of the moon closing in on Saturn just prior to occultation. Credit: Gianluca Masi using SkyX software
Funny thing. Skywatchers are often just as excited to watch a celestial object disappear as we are to see it make an appearance. Early Wednesday morning (May 14) the Full Flower Moon will slip in front of Saturn, covering it from view for about an hour for observers in Australia and New Zealand. If you don’t live where the dingoes roam, no worries. You can watch it online.And no matter where you are on the planet, the big moon will accompany the ringed planet across the sky this Tues. night-Weds. morning.
Moon-Saturn occultation from Perth, Australia Feb. 22, 2014 captured by Colin Legg
Occultations of stars happen swiftly. The moon’s limb meets the pinpoint star and bam! it’s gone in a flash. But Saturn is an extended object and the moon needs time to cover one end of the rings to the other. Planetary occultations afford the opportunity to remove yourself from planet Earth and watch a planet ‘set’ and ‘rise’ over the alien lunar landscape. Like seeing a Chesley Bonestell painting in the flesh.
Saturn and the moon Tuesday night (May 13) just before midnight as viewed from the U.S. Stellarium
As the moon approaches Saturn, the planet first touches the lunar limb and then appears to ‘set’ as it’s covered by degrees. About an hour later, the planet ‘rises’ from the opposite limb. Planetary occultations are infrequent and always worth the effort to see.
Seen from the northern hemisphere and equatorial regions, the nearly full moon will appear several degrees to the right or west of Saturn tomorrow night (May 13). As the night deepens and the moon rolls westward, the two grow closer and closer. They’ll be only a degree apart (two full moon diameters) during Wednesday morning twilight seen from the West Coast. Northern hemisphere viewers will notice that the moon slides to the south of the planet overnight.
Map showing the region where the occultation of Saturn will be visible. Click to get times of Saturn’s disappearance and reappearance for individual cities. Times shown are UT or Universal Time. Add 9.5 hours for Australian Central Standard Time. Credit: IOTA
Skywatchers in Australia will see the moon cover Saturn during convenient early evening viewing hours May 14:
* 8:09 p.m. local time from Adelaide
* 9:05 p.m. Brisbane
* 8:50 p.m. Melbourne
* 8:53 p.m. Canberra
* 8:56 p.m. from Sydney (More times and a map – click HERE)
Before the occultation, Saturn will shine close to the moon’s upper right and might be tricky to see with the naked eye because of glare.
Binoculars will easily reveal the planet, but a telescope is the instrument of choice. Even a small scope magnifying at least 30x will show Saturn and its rings hovering above the bright edge of the moon. Stick around. About an hour later, Saturn will re-emerge along the moon’s lower left limb.
Saturn and its moons Tuesday night May 13 around 10 p.m. CDT. Titan’s the brightest and easiest moon to see at magnitude +8.5. Iapetus ranges from magnitude +10 when it’s west of Saturn and we see its bright hemisphere to magnitude +12 when it’s east of the planet. Created with Meridian software
Meanwhile, back in the western hemisphere, we’ll watch the nearly full Flower Moon make a close pass of the planet. If you’ve had difficulty finding the celestial ring bearer, you’ll have no problem Tuesday night. Take a look at Saturn’s wonderful system of rings in your telescope – they’re tipped nearly wide open this year. For even more fun, see how many moons you can spot. And don’t forget, you can watch it online courtesy of astrophysicist Gianluca Masi. His Virtual Telescope website will broadcast the occultation live starting at 10:15 Universal Time May 14 (6:15 a.m. EDT, 5:15 CDT, 4:15 MDT and 3:15 PDT).
Mercury starts its best period of visibility in the evening sky for skywatchers at mid-northern latitudes this weekend. This map shows the sky facing northwest about 40 minutes after sundown. Bright Jupiter also provides a convenient sightline for locating Mercury. Stellarium
Don’t let furtive Mercury slip through your fingers this spring. The next two and a half weeks will be the best time this year for observers north of the tropics to spot the sun-hugging planet. If you’ve never seen Mercury, you might be surprised how bright it can be. This is especially true early in its apparition when the planet looks like a miniature ‘full moon’.
Mercury, like Venus, displays phases as it revolves around the sun as seen from Earth’s perspective outside Mercury’s orbit. Both Mercury and Venus appear largest when nearly lined up between Earth and sun at inferior conjunction. Planets not to scale and phases shown are approximate. Credit: Bob King
Both Venus and Mercury pass through phases identical to those of the moon. When between us and the sun, Mercury’s a thin crescent, when off to one side, a ‘half-moon’ and when on the far side of the sun, a full moon. This apparition of the planet is excellent because Mercury’s path it steeply tilted to the horizon in mid-spring.
We start the weekend with Mercury nearly full and brighter than the star Arcturus. Twilight tempers its radiance, but :
* Find a location with a wide open view to the northwest as far down to the horizon as possible.
* Click HERE to get your sunset time and begin looking for the planet about 30-40 minutes after sunset in the direction of the sunset afterglow.
* Reach your arm out to the northwestern horizon and look a little more than one vertically-held fist (10-12 degrees) above it for a singular, star-like object. Found it? Congratulations – that’s Mercury!
* No luck? Start with binoculars instead and sweep the bright sunset glow until you find Mercury. Once you know exactly where to look, lower the binoculars from your eyes and you should see the planet without optical aid. And before I forget – be sure to focus the binoculars on a distant object like a cloud or the moon before beginning your sweeps. I guarantee you won’t find Mercury if it’s out of focus.
Through a telescope, Mercury looks like a gibbous moon right now but its phase will lessen as it moves farther to the ‘left’ or east of the sun. Greatest eastern elongation happens on May 24. On and around that date the planet will be farthest from the sun, standing 12-14 degrees high 40 minutes after sundown from most mid-northern locales.
Mercury is even better placed on May 19 but fades and begins to drop back down toward the horizon late in the month. Stellarium
The planet fades in late May and become difficult to see by early June. Inferior conjunction, when Mercury passes between the Earth and sun, occurs on June 19. Unlike Venus, which remains brilliant right up through its crescent phase, Mercury loses so much reflective surface area as a crescent that it fades to magnitude +3. Its greater distance from Earth, lack of reflective clouds and smaller size can’t compete with closer, brighter and bigger Venus.
When a planet crosses the disk of the sun it’s called a transit. Mercury’s path across the solar disk is seen from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on November 8, 2006. Credit: NASA.
Mercury’s 7-degree inclined orbit means it typically glides well above or below the sun’s disk at inferior conjunction. But anywhere from 3 up to 13 years in either November or May the planet passes directly between the Earth and sun at inferior conjunction and we witness a transit. This last happened for U.S. observers on Nov. 8, 2006; the next transit occurs exactly two years from today on May 9, 2016. That event will be widely visible across the Americas, Western Europe and Africa. After having so much fun watching the June 2012 transit of VenusI can’t wait.
The Moon, tiny Earth and the vastness of space,as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Wide Angle Camera (WAC). Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.
That’s Earth. That’s us. Way off in the distance as a fairly small, blue and swirly white sphere. This is the newest so-called “Earthrise” image, and it was taken on February 1, 2014 by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
“LRO experiences twelve earthrises every day, however LROC is almost always busy imaging the lunar surface so only rarely does an opportunity arise such that LROC can capture a view of the Earth,” wrote LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson on the instrument’s website. “On the first of February of this year LRO pitched forward while approaching the north pole allowing the LROC WAC to capture the Earth rising above Rozhdestvenskiy crater (180-km diameter).”
Robinson went on to explain that the Earth is a color composite from several frames and the colors are very close to what the average person would see if they were looking back at Earth themselves from lunar orbit. “Also, in this image the relative brightness between the Earth and the Moon is correct, note how much brighter the Earth is relative to the Moon,” Robinson said.
Gorgeous.
Below is a gif image that demonstrates how images are combined over several orbits to create a full image from the Wide Angle Camera.
A gif image showing the “venetian blind” banding demonstrates how a WAC image is built up frame-by-frame. The gaps between the frames are due to the real separation of the WAC filters on the CCD. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.
The frames were acquired at two second intervals, so the total time to collect the sequence was 5 minutes. The video is faster than reality by a factor of about 20.
Hosts: Fraser Cain and Scott Lewis
Astronomers: Gary Gonella, Andrew Dumbleton, Stuart Foreman, David Dickinson, Shahrin Ahmad and special guest Henna Khan from Bombay, India
Tonight’s Views:
the Moon’s surface
M44 Beehive Cluster
Neutron Star B224 from HST
All-Sky View
Mars with ice caps and Hellas Basin visible
Comet C/2012 K1 PanSTARRS
Stuart demonstrating how to work with software to process images
M51a Whirlpool Galaxy
M53 Globular Cluster
Rosette Nebula – NGC 2237, 2238, 2239 and 2246
Saturn
Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33 in emission nebula IC 434) and Flame Nebula (NGC 2024) with a satellite trail
NGC 5139 Omega Centauri
M42 Orion Nebula
M63 Sunflower Galaxy
NGC 7635 Bubble Nebula
Large and Small Magellanic Clouds
We hold the Virtual Star Party every Sunday night as a live Google+ Hangout on Air. We begin the show when it gets dark on the West Coast. If you want to get a notification, make sure you circle the Virtual Star Party on Google+. You can watch on our YouTube channel or here on Universe Today.
Airbus A300 B4-622R from London to Paris -- and to the Moon? -- on April 5, 2014. Credit and copyright: Sebastien Lebrigand.
Fly me — or my package — to the Moon? “Anything is possible!” said astrophotographer Sebastien Lebrigand, via email to Universe Today. Lebrigand lives along the flight path to the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and regularly takes images of planes flying in front of the Moon, (see another of his shots here), but he’s thinking this might be his best one yet.
He used a 102/660 mm refractor telescope with a Canon EOS60d camera to capture this shot.
Note: This photo does not constitute an endorsement or advertisement.
Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.
If you’re reading this then you’re probably a big fan of space exploration. And while on one hand you could say that we are now living in a “golden age” of exploration, what with the ongoing missions there are around the Solar System and the new discoveries being made on an almost weekly basis about our Universe, on the other hand it seems like we are getting more and more “grounded” as human explorers, with still years to go before the first footprints are made on Mars, an ever-growing span since we last walked on the Moon, and steadily-shrinking or stagnant budgets that can’t support all the missions that DO exist — and sometimes cancel them altogether.
“We have discovered amazing places. But imagine what’s hiding where we haven’t even looked?”
In order for missions to ever get off the ground, they need to be funded. Right now NASA — still arguably the leader in space exploration among world agencies — receives a little over 0.4 percent of every U.S. tax dollar. Less than half a penny. That’s what NASA explores the Solar System with, what makes our knowledge of the Universe — from the farthest visible reaches right down to our own planet Earth — even possible. What if NASA were to receive a full one percent? A whole penny from every dollar? That’d still be only a quarter of what NASA worked with to put men on the Moon in 1969, but it’d be more than double what it gets now.
A penny for NASA… this is the goal of Penny4NASA.org, an outreach group that strives to increase the funding — if just by a little — of the world’s most accomplished, inspirational, and powerful space exploration administration. (Before… you know, it isn’t.)
The video above was created for Penny4NASA by artist and animator Brad Goodspeed, and reminds us of what NASA has achieved in its 50-year history, of what its goals are (or at least should be) and, unfortunately, why many of them have remained unattained. NASA needs support — our support — or else its candles will stay unlit and our windows and doors to the Universe will slowly but surely close.
How can you help? Well for one thing, stay excited about space and science (and get others excited too!) Interest is the key to making sure people don’t lose sight of what’s happening in the field; you might be surprised to hear the misinformation that’s been passed around. (No, NASA isn’t “dead.”) And let your policy-makers know that space exploration and the investment in technology and innovation that goes along with it is important to you — the Planetary Society has a convenient page where you can find links to write to your state representative here. And finally you can support groups like Penny4NASA, made up of enthusiastic young professionals who want to see our nation’s past successes in space exploration continued into their future.
“America is fading right now. Nobody’s dreaming about tomorrow anymore. NASA knows how to dream about tomorrow — if the funding can accommodate it, if the funding can empower it.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
Want more inspiration? Read this excerpt from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Space Chronicleson TheWeek.com here.
The zodiacal light (left) reaches up from the eastern horizon to "touch" the Milky Way at right on Sept. 23, 2012. Credit: Bob King
Sunrise over the surface of the moon: a series of star tracker images taken by LADEE Saturday, April 12. The lunar horizon is ahead, a few minutes before orbital sunrise. Image Credit: NASA Ames.
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NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) literally ‘saw the light’ just days before crashing into the lunar farside last Thursday April 17. Skimming just a few kilometers above the moon’s surface, mission controllers took advantage of this unique low angle to gaze out over the moon’s horizon in complete darkness much like the Apollo astronauts did from lunar orbit more than 40 years ago.
The zodiacal light (left), adorned by the planet Venus, reaches up from the eastern horizon to “touch” the Milky Way before sunrise on Sept. 23, 2012. Credit: Bob King
With the glow of Earth well-hidden, any dust in the moon’s scant atmosphere around the time of orbital sunrise should become visible. Scientists also expected to see the softly luminous glow of the zodiacal light, an extensive cloud of comet and asteroid dust concentrated in the flat plane of the solar system. The zodiacal light gets its name from the zodiac, that familiar band of constellations the planets pass through as they orbit the sun. Back on Earth, the zodiacal light looks like a big thumb of light standing up from the western horizon a couple hours after sunset in spring and before sunrise in fall.
Frame from LADEE’s star tracker camera showing the zodiacal light rising on the moon’s horizon from its extremely low orbit on April 12, 2014. Credit: NASA
So what did LADEE see? As you watch the animation above, comprised of images taken from darkness until sunrise, you’ll see a yellow haze on the horizon that expands into large diffuse glow tilted slightly to the right. This is the zodiacal light along with a smaller measure of light coming from sun’s outer atmosphere or corona. Together they’re referred to as CZL or ‘coronal and zodiacal light’. At the very end, the sun peaks over the lunar horizon.
This is a sketch of the lunar sunrise seen from orbit by Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan. On the right, the sketches are highlighted in color to show the sources of the scattered light: red indicates coronal and zodiacal light (CZL), blue is a glow along the lunar horizon possibly caused by dust suspended in the moon’s exosphere, and green may be crepuscular rays formed by shadowing and scattered light. Credit: NASA/phys.org
What appears to be missing from the pictures are the mysterious rays seen by some of the Apollo astronauts. The rays, neatly sketched by astronaut Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17, look a lot like those beams of light and shadow streaming though holes in clouds called crepuscular rays.
Crepuscular rays form a crown of rays made of alternating shadows and light scattered by dust and moisture in the atmosphere. Credit: Bob King
Only thing is, Earth’s atmosphere is thick enough for cloud beams. The dust in the moon’s atmosphere appears much too thin to cause the same phenomenon. And yet the astronauts saw rays as if sunlight streamed between mountain peaks and scattered off the dust just like home.
Low level horizon glow photos on the moon captured by the Surveyor 7 unmanned lander in 1968. It’s possible this low altitude glow is caused by larger dust particles that don’t travel as high as the smaller motes. Credit: NASA
It’s believed that dust gets lofted into the spare lunar atmosphere via electricity. Ultraviolet light from the sun knocks electrons from atoms in moon dust, giving them a positive charge. Since like charges repel, bits of dust push away from one another and move in the direction of least resistance: up. The smaller the dust particle, the higher it rises until dropping back down to the surface. Perhaps these “fountains” of lunar dust illuminated by the sun are what the astronauts recorded.
Unlike Cernan, LADEE saw only the expected coronal and zodiacal light but no rays. Scientists plan to look more closely at several sequences of images made of lunar sunrise in hopes of finding them.
