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Explanation: Mars, Antares, Moon, and Saturn are the brightest celestial beacons in this serene sky. The Sun's golden light is still scattered along the southwestern horizon though, captured after sunset on September 28. The evening gathering of wandering planets and Moon along with the bright star viewed as an equal to Mars and the Scorpion's Heart was enjoyed around planet Earth. But from the photographer's perspective looking across the calm waters of Lake Balaton, Hungary, they were joined by a more terrestrial sailboat mast light. Mast light, bright star, planets and Moon are all posing near the plane of the...

The "blood moon" total lunar eclipse will rise during the full moon of Oct. 8 just before sunrise in North America, but red might not be the only color people see during the total eclipse. Weather permitting, it's possible that some sharp-eyed observers might be able to see some blue in the moon's glow. The event will be the second of four consecutive total lunar eclipses in 2014 and 2015, according to NASA officials. On the East Coast of the United States, totality starts at 6:25 a.m. EDT (1025 GMT), but stargazers on the West Coast of the United States...

“When we first saw it in the Grail data, we were struck by how big it was, how clear it was, but also by how unexpected it was,” said Andrews-Hanna “No-one ever thought you’d see a square or a rectangle on this scale on any planet,” he continued. Similar to Earth? Not quite. The scientist and his compatriots point out that the region is comprised of numerous native radioactive elements including uranium, potassium, and thorium which in the past would have heated the lunar crust and contracted upon cooling. That contraction tore into the moon’s surface and formed massively deep...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered a "mysterious feature" on Saturn's moon Titan. Scientists are working to determine, what, exactly, this feature might be. NASA reports that the feature is roughly 100 square miles, and it lies in Ligeia Mare, one of Titan's hydrocarbon seas. Cassini's radar has observed the feature twice, but its appearance changed between the two sightings. Scientists suspect the feature's change in appearance could be the result of Titan's changing seasons, which Cassini's current extended mission will monitor. The feature's first sighting was in July 2013, and the radar images depicted a bright spot, which stood out...

The first manned missions to Earth's satellite began in 1969 with Apollo 11. Just a few years later, conspiracies sprouted up claiming that potentially each of the six lunar landing crews and every one of the 12 Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon had in fact participated in an elaborate ruse. To the conspiracists, it may never have happened -- or didn't happen like NASA said it did -- and oh by the way, we duped the Russians into losing the space race. Voxel global illumination, however, proves them wrong, says Nvidia. The technique, which the new GTX 970...

Explanation: What is so super about tomorrow's supermoon? Tomorrow, a full moon will occur that appears slightly larger and brighter than usual. The reason is that the Moon's fully illuminated phase occurs within a short time from perigee - when the Moon is its closest to the Earth in its elliptical orbit. Although the precise conditions that define a supermoon vary, given one definition, tomorrow's will be the third supermoon of the year -- and the third consecutive month that a supermoon occurs. One reason supermoons are popular is because they are so easy to see -- just go outside...

Explanation: Have you ever watched the Moon rise? The slow rise of a nearly full moon over a clear horizon can be an impressive sight. One impressive moonrise was imaged in early 2013 over Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, New Zealand. With detailed planning, an industrious astrophotographer placed a camera about two kilometers away and pointed it across the lookout to where the Moon would surely soon be making its nightly debut. The above single shot sequence is unedited and shown in real time -- it is not a time lapse. People on Mount Victoria Lookout can be seen in...

Monday at the Laborfest event in Milwaukee, President Barack Obama gave a passionate speech in his plea for fair wages for workers. At a raised pitch, he said, "I´m not asking for the moon. I just want a good deal for the workers." The president also discussed his "vision for an economy," where workers have a fair chance, retirement benefits, family leave and pay equality for woman.

Explanation: Big, bright, and beautiful, a Full Moon near perigee, the closest point in its elliptical orbit around our fair planet, rose on August 10. This remarkable picture records the scene with a dreamlike quality from the east coast of the United States. The picture is actually a composite of 10 digital frames made with exposures from 1/500th second to 1 second long, preserving contrast and detail over a much wider than normal range of brightness. At a perigee distance of a mere 356,896 kilometers, August's Full Moon was the closest, and so the largest and most super, of the...

Now here’s something I guarantee you’ve never seen before: a video of the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon showing the two distinctly separate worlds actually in motion around each other! Captured by the steadily-approaching New Horizons spacecraft from July 19–24, the 12 images that comprise this animation were acquired with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument from distances of 267 million to 262 million miles (429 million to 422 million km) and show nearly a full orbital rotation. ... Pluto and Charon are seen circling a central gravitational point known as the barycenter, which accounts for...

July 20, 2014, will mark the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, the first time humans had ever set foot on another part of the universe. Besides being a tremendous scientific achievement, it was also an important political statement, a battle victory for the US and the West over the Soviet Union and the Communists in the Cold War, a battle known as the Space Race. During World War II the technological leaders in rocket science were the Germans. After the war, with the Cold War underway, the US and the USSR each tried to...

I vividly recall being in the living room with my family watching tv in 1969 as the American Astronauts walked on the moon. The pictures were fuzzy, black and white, somewhat indistinct. It almost resembled an Ultrasound image an expectant mother would see. We were thrilled to be part of a country, a culture so advanced as to put men on the moon and later, to bring them back safely to earth. We had completely one-upped communist Russia! Sputnik was a very important step in space exploration. Quite significant back in 1957, but that was a long time ago, back...

The year was 1969. The turbulent time in America saw troops fighting in Vietnam, and a nation dealing with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, killed in 1963, and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., both murdered in 1968. Then came that one small step. Forty-five years ago today, 500 million people around the world witnessed American astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins as they embarked on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and six hours later Armstrong was the first man to step...

Explanation: What happened to half of Saturn? Nothing other than Earth's Moon getting in the way. As pictured above on the far right, Saturn is partly eclipsed by a dark edge of a Moon itself only partly illuminated by the Sun. This year the orbits of the Moon and Saturn have led to an unusually high number of alignments of the ringed giant behind Earth's largest satellite. Technically termed an occultation, the above image captured one such photogenic juxtaposition from Buenos Aires, Argentina that occurred early last week. Visible to the unaided eye but best viewed with binoculars, there are...

Hamdan: With every full moon comes a new beginning and with every new beginning comes opportunitiesSheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, shared these pictures and video on his Instagram account of him atop the world’s tallest building - Burj Khalifa – with the Super Moon in the backgrounD. Along with the picture, Sheikh Hamdan wrote: “With every full moon comes a new beginning and with every new beginning comes opportunities! A big thank you to all my followers.” Sheikh Hamdan also posted this video: “Super moon, super city for my super followers!” Social networking...

A team from Harvard University presented a study this month that remnants from an ancient Earth exists, right now, inside contemporary Earth. The group believes that their comparisons of isotopic ratios of noble gases from materials deep inside Earth with those near the surface provide testimony that the deep-down material is actually from the Earth that existed before its massive collision with another planet. That immense impact – the largest in geologic history – is what many believe led to creation of the Moon. The currently favored theory about how the Moon originated says that it was formed 4.5 billion...

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...