Tonight was the night of the the biggest Super Moon seen in the sky since 2007, and as driving towards Arnprior, it absolutely beamed in the night sky in clear conditions.
Also known as a Hunter’s Moon, the Super Moon will be up and at it for most of the week, but dependant upon the amount of cloud cover above where you happen to be. In fact it’s tomorrow, October 17 that will feature the moon appearing to be at its largest, so that makes tomorrow’s moon the true Hunter Moon for astronomy purists. The full moon will be at its perigee of orbit around Earth, meaning that the full moon seen will be at its closest to the planet it orbits around. That’s us!
But that’s not all. Other events will be taking place up there, including the possibility of making a sighting of the comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas, something not seen with the naked eye all that often. If you miss it, not to worry. It’ll swing back this way again in some 80,000 years, so plenty of time to prepare for your next viewing attempt. I can’t remember an easily visible comet in the sky since Hale-Bopp back in 1997, and before that Halley’s Comet in the mid-1980’s. Both were impressive, once-in-a-lifetime events.
If you’re really up for an experience, bundle up, get away from the town’s lights and watch an eclipse of the planet Saturn by the aforementioned full moon. This can be experienced with the naked eye, but the moon’s brilliance may wash out your view of Saturn as it appears to move behind the moon and then emerge on the other side. The rotation of the Earth makes this a really cool event, just like a full solar eclipse, except in this case you’ve got Saturn involved, a planet some 1.36 billion kilometres away. A telescope and some binoculars will bring Saturn’s rings into focus, not to mention a couple of the moons that orbit that distant planet.
Finally, and somewhat easier, you can get a view this week of the Super Moon near the Pleiades star cluster, a magnificent collection of stars that some people mistake for the Little Dipper since it has the appearance of, well, a little dipper.
Looking at the moon this evening with my son, a couple of planes traversed the sky in the same part of the sky as the moon. The contrails from these aircraft streamed behind these flights, creating a geometric array featuring supplementary angles that math geeks would approve of. But then the moon appeared to move right through those entrails, which of course it didn’t, but rather appeared to as a result of the Earth’s rotation once again. And yes contrails waft of their own accord, subject to the laws of physical science, but they didn’t have enough time to do their wafting because what I’m describing here happened very quickly, and it was just serendipity that we happened to be looking up there when all this went down, if I can use that term when essentially looking up. You know, the whole looking up at what’s going down thing.
The video posted above doesn’t do it complete justice, but the light being thrown off in multiple directions was worth the price of admission on its own.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 