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Creation stories tend to be outlandish, in keeping with the near impossibility of explaining why the world is the way it is — from the week-long labours of the Old Testament God, to the eternal cycles of the Hindu creator Brahma, to Raven’s metaphysical trickery in Pacific Northwest First Nations tradition. Fanciful as they are, however, these myths have nothing on modern science, whose creation story — which already involves a mysterious Big Bang, perhaps one of many creations ex nihilo in infinite succession — this week got even weirder. At a geophysics conference in California, a series of discoveries...

Explanation: The Sun set on Friday the 13th as a full Honey Moon rose, captured in this well-planned time-lapse sequence. Lisbon, Portugal's Christ the King monument is in the foreground, about 6 kilometers distant from camera and telephoto lens. During the days surrounding today's solstice (June 21, 10:51 UT) the Sun follows its highest arc through northern hemisphere skies as it travels along the ecliptic plane. At night the ecliptic plane is low, and the Full Moon's path close to the ecliptic was also low, the rising Moon separating more slowly from the distant horizon. Northern moon watchers were likely...

Friday the 13th and a full moon can lead to real fears for some If you’re a selenophobic— people who fear the moon— or suffer from friggatriskaidekaphobia— fear of Friday the 13th— you may not want to leave the house today. For the first time in nearly a century, there will be a full moon rising on Friday the 13th. And for some, superstitions of these two phenomena are very real. “In the U.S. there are millions and millions of people who just want to stay home and not take any chances on either one of these – Friday the...

A man was arrested by Prescott Valley police after he shot his handgun in a residence and claimed he was shooting at the moon. On Friday, a 49-year-old woman called police because her boyfriend had fired shots from a handgun and was still armed at the time, according to the Prescott Valley Police Department. Officers arrived at a residence near Robert Road and Loos Drive where they confronted 39-year-old Cameron Read. Read initially refused to leave the residence, but eventually exited and resisted arrest before being taken into custody by force, according to police. The victims told police Read had...

Arizona police arrest man for shooting at the moon PHOENIX (Reuters) - A marijuana smoker was arrested in Arizona after shooting at the moon with a handgun and wrestling with officers who were called by his girlfriend to subdue him, authorities said on Wednesday. Police went to a home in Prescott Valley, about 85 miles north of Phoenix, late last Friday where the woman told them her partner had fired several shots into the air after telling her and her teenage son he had seen Halley's Comet. Prescott Valley police spokesman Sergeant Brandon Bonney said Cameron Read, 39, was arrested...

  Amateur hour-day-week-month-year continues at the White House.From The Blaze, can you spot the error in Obama’s tweet?: #TimeForAHistoryLesson Man first walked on the moon in 1969.Maybe Obama hired his White House staff away from the golf courses and resorts he’s spent so much time on. Only problem with that theory is those caddies and waiters are smarter than this group of clowns. 

Last week, the engineering arm of the European Space Agency confirmed that it has been commissioned to test the space-hardiness of the capsule that would contain the Torah, the Post reported. The capsule must be designed to protect the sacred text from the moon’s harsh radiation and temperature changes for at least 10,000 years. The moon lacks an atmosphere to trap heat, and the surface temperatures can rocket to a daytime high of about 253 degrees and plunge to 279 degrees below zero at night.

A new analysis of lunar rocks brought home by Apollo mission astronauts has shed fresh light on the violent birth of the moon. Researchers in Germany have found small but distinctive chemical signatures that suggest the moon formed when a giant planetary body slammed into the early Earth 4.5bn years ago. Scientists have several theories for how the moon may have formed, but the "giant impact hypothesis" has been the leading explanation for some time. A cataclysmic impact between the Earth and a Mars-sized planet, known as Theia, would have scattered rock and dust from both bodies out into space,...

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Russia is planning to put a manned colony on the Moon as soon as in 2030, and is racing to dispatch the first robotic rovers to explore the lunar surface two years from now, a media report says. Newspaper Izvestia said Thursday it had gained access to a draft government program, prepared by the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Roscosmos federal space agency, Moscow State University and several space research institutes, outlining a three-step plan toward manning the moon.

Nature of mysterious hot spot revealed by “photogeology” Analysis of new images of a curious “hot spot” on the far side of the Moon reveal it to be a small volcanic province created by the upwelling of silicic magma. The unusual location of the province and the surprising composition of the lava that formed it offer tantalizing clues to the Moon’s thermal history. The hot spot is a concentration of a radioactive element thorium sitting between the very large and ancient impact craters Compton and Belkovich that was first detected by Lunar Prospector’s gamma-ray spectrometer in 1998. The Compton-Belkovich Thorium...

Explanation: Why would a bright full Moon suddenly become dark? Because it entered the shadow of the Earth. Almost two weeks ago this exact event happened as the Moon underwent a total lunar eclipse. That eclipse, visible from the half of the Earth then facing the Moon, was captured in numerous spectacular photographs and is depicted in the above time lapse video covering about an hour. The above video, recorded from Mt. Lemmon Sky Center in Arizona, USA, keeps the Earth shadow centered and shows the Moon moving through it from west to east. The temporarily good alignment between Earth,...

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...

John C. Houbolt, an engineer whose contributions to the U.S. space program were vital to NASA's successful moon landing in 1969, has died. He was 95. Houbolt died Tuesday at a nursing home in Scarborough, Maine, from complications from Parkinson's disease, his son-in-law Tucker Withington, of Plymouth, Mass., confirmed Saturday. As NASA describes on its website, while under pressure during the U.S.-Soviet space race, Houbolt was the catalyst in securing U.S. commitment to the science and engineering theory that eventually carried the Apollo crew to the moon and back safely.

Explanation: A beautiful, reddened Moon slid through dark skies on April 15, completely immersed in Earth's shadow for well over an hour. It was the year's first total lunar eclipse and was widely enjoyed over the planet's Western Hemisphere. Seen from the Caribbean island of Barbados, the dimmed lunar disk is captured during totality in this colorful skyview. The dark Moon's red color contrasts nicely with bright bluish star Spica, alpha star of the constellation Virgo, posing only about two degrees away. Brighter than Spica and about 10 degrees from the Moon on the right, Mars is near opposition and...

The lunar eclipse this week will be the first of four "blood moons" and because significant events have occurred in history around the time of blood moon tetrads, many are wondering whether the biblical prophecy of the coming apocalypse is near. “Conspiracy websites draw parallels between lunar eclipses and historical events, like the fall of Constantinople and the founding of the State of Israel,” reports CTV News on April 13.

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — Just in time for tax day, which may feel like trying to squeeze blood from a rock, the moon will appear blood-red in a total lunar eclipse on the night of April 14th and overnight into April 15h. The total eclipse will be at its best over the Bay Area at 12:46 a.m. on April 15th, but the beginnings of the eclipse will be visible starting around 9:55 p.m. The moon will begin turning red at 12:08 a.m. The eclipse is a rare celestial phenomenon easily observed with the naked eye, and as such it...

He is sitting at his desk, at the headquarters of his company — of one of his companies — SpaceX. He is eating. He is eating a plate of food that his personal assistant gave him. It is late, and he is eating to stay on schedule. He is a man of scrupulously developed politesse, and he worries that eating his scheduled dinner while completing his scheduled interview might give offense. It does not, because although he eats hungrily, he never succeeds in making his food look appetizing. On his white plate is a turkey leg, a sad bouquet of...

Explanation: Tidally locked in synchronous rotation, the Moon always presents its familiar nearside to denizens of planet Earth. From lunar orbit, the Moon's farside can become familiar, though. In fact this sharp picture, a mosaic from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's wide angle camera, is centered on the lunar farside. Part of a global mosaic of over 15,000 images acquired between November 2009 and February 2011, the highest resolution version shows features at a scale of 100 meters per pixel. Surprisingly, the rough and battered surface of the farside looks very different from the nearside covered with smooth dark lunar maria....