Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with moon

Boston area Sunset/moonrise on June 23rd.

bondcliff — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:25:44 -0800

Where would be a good location in Eastern Massachusetts to see and photograph both the sunset and (full) moonrise on Sunday, June 23rd? Sunset is at 8:25 PM, azimuth 303° (NWbW). Moonrise is at 8:33 PM, azimuth 116° (ESE).

I would like to be somewhere where I can see both these things happen with little or no obstruction. Priority is on the moon but if I can get a clear view to both that would be best. I'm thinking up high or on the water. Right now Castle Island is in the lead which would give me the moon rising over the islands and the town of Hull.

The place should be legally accessible after dark, which rules out the Blue Hills and many other reservations. I am a hiker and have no problem with night hiking but I'd prefer to keep it less ambitious. Paved or at least smooth trails would be best.

Dark sky doesn't matter. The moon is bright. In fact if I can find somewhere where the moon is over the Boston skyline, that would be pretty cool.

I'd prefer a natural location but if the best location is on top of an empty parking garage in Cambridge, let me know.

Parking and/or T accessible are a plus. Nothing that requires a boat to get to. I am also kicking around the idea of making this an IRL meetup if there is interest. Somewhere like Castle Island would be good for a pre-sunset picnic.

The moon will be full that night and will be at lunar perigee, also known as the "Super Moon", which if you believe the TV news means the Moon will be located approximately 17 miles from the Earth.

Is anyone selling scale model moons? Ie. Io, Iapetus etc?

panaceanot — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 02:06:38 -0800

The moons in our solar system are remarkably diverse and interesting. My google-fu is failing me, but I was hoping to get a set of models of moons to admire. Anyone making these?

Lunar Modules and cellphones

Brandon Blatcher — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 08:34:09 -0800

1) How much memory did the Apollo Lunar Module (LM) have and 2) when was the first cellphone with the same amount of memory introduced to the public? 3) Where there any other publicly available products that had the same amount of memory? 4) If so, when were they introduced to the market? This may be a bit of a tricky question in terms defining what computer memory and the fact that that the Apollo Flight Guidance Computer (AGC) had two kinds of memory, fixed and erasable.

My understanding is that the software to run the LM was in the fixed type of memory on the craft. So I'm specifically looking for which cellphone had a similar amount of memory to run its OS. It may have had more for the user to store numbers or later photos, but I'm just interested in the amount of memory that would be needed to store the OS that ran the phone.

Where can I get that Haagen Dazs Moon Ice Cream Cake?

J0 — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 20:07:12 -0800

Does anyone know if the Haagen Dazs Moon Ice Cream Cakes will be coming to America this Holiday Season PLEASE and where they can be found or do I have to fly to the UK to eat this thing?

And the moon will be yours to do whatever you like

Frowner — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 07:38:51 -0800

Help me find this poem that involves the moon! I can't remember it but can remember the feeling I had when reading it! There is this poem that I used to know very well. It doesn't rhyme. It's in the first person. It takes place at night. The narrator is talking to someone and talks about them coming to visit him at his office (or home?) at night. And there's a line about how the narrator will give the hearer the moon, and she can do whatever she likes with it, tie it up outside her house by the river.

Please help, mefites! I have missed this poem.

It is a poem with images of night, stars, lights.

What part of the earth gets the most moonlight?

zinful — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 15:49:35 -0800

Is there any place on Earth that gets the most moonlight? Hey astronomers! I don't know if this even makes sense to ask, but my partner and I have been kicking around whether there is any place on Earth that gets what could be described as the most moonlight. Moonlight only counts as times where it is only the moon showing, not also the sun (since it's reflected light from the sun, I know this seems arbitrary, but I'm not looking for just visible moon, since the light really does look different).

Is there any way to determine this?
Does the whole Earth get the same amount of moonlight per year?
How would one even start to figure this out (astronomy was many years ago)?

If the earth had a second moon, could the moons ever cross? How and when?

Lutoslawski — Wed, 30 May 2012 14:12:52 -0800

Imagine that the earth is hit by another Mars-ish sized object causing a second moon to be formed. If the second moon were orbiting the Earth inside or outside of the orbit of The Moon, and assuming it was not orbiting the Earth parallel to The Moon, the two moons would have to cross each other at some point, right? A sort of moon-over-moon eclipse thing. How would you calculate how often this would occur? What would it look like? Does this happen on planets with more than one natural satellite? Does the premise of this question make no sense because my knowledge of astrophysics is basically nil? Explain to me like I am in fifth grade, please. As I understand it, the moon orbits around the earth where it does based on a common center of gravity. So if this second moon were to be larger or smaller, would the second moon be able to orbit inside or outside of The Moon's orbit?

If so, then could it orbit Earth on a plane that wasn't parallel to The Moon's orbit?

If both of those things happened, then ostensibly the moons would have cross each other at some point, right? Is there a name for this? How would you calculate how often/when this would occur?

If this happened, what would it look like? If the moon is reflecting light from the sun, would one moon crossing over the other just block out the light reflecting from the farther moon?

Are there any other weird things (like weird tidal things or the like) that would drastically change by having a second moon?

Does this not make any sense whatsoever because I've gotten some basic premise about gravity and mass and orbits mixed up?

Please explain to me like I don't know much about how the movements of celestial bodies work, because I don't.

Thank you Metafilter.

At what altitude does the Earth look like a big blue marble?

alms — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 08:20:27 -0800

How far up do you have to go to see the Blue Marble? Clearly you have to be higher than the International Space Station, but you don't have to go all the way to the moon.

Googling yields lots of info about seeing the curvature of the Earth, but that's not what I'm looking for. I want to know how far you have to go to see the whole Earth as a circle.

If you believe in my man in the moon...

zardoz — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:33:30 -0800

Is the man in the moon I see the same as everyone else? I've always been a bit confused as to the face--is there more than one? The one I always see is a three-quarters head shot of a man with kind of thick wavy hair, facing to the right. The other image is more vague, a roughly ape or gorilla-looking face that takes up the whole moon.

What is the "official" man in the moon?

What would happen if large-scale lunar mining operations became commonplace?

asnider — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:36:11 -0800

Could mining the moon destroy the oceans? I was talking to a few people about the recent news about mining the moon and someone mentioned that this is a bad idea because it'll decrease the mass of the moon (and increase the mass of the Earth, as the raw ore comes home for processing), thus affecting the tides and potentially destroying some or all ocean habitats.

On a purely theoretical level, I realize that this is true. But how realistic are these concerns?

How much mass would actually need to be removed from the moon in order to significantly affect the tides, especially if the mass isn't just disappearing, but is being transferred to the Earth?

My question is actually three-fold:

How much would the mass of the moon need to decrease in order to have an impact on the tides, assuming that the missing mass is added to the mass of the Earth?

How likely is it that this would ever happen, even assuming large-scale lunar mining operations become commonplace?

Assuming the mass of the moon and/or Earth was changed dramatically enough to alter the tides, what impact would this have on the oceans and on life on Earth more generally?

This question is related, but doesn't quite answer the questions that I'm asking.

Child befriends talking butterfly (person)?

yamsmith — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 17:50:00 -0800

Child befriends talking butterfly (person)? Help us identify this movie! So it's the early 90s and a small girl in Finland sees a film just like this. The butterfly has some weird connection to the moon/moonlight. There's also a very sad ending where the friendship ends and the butterfly flies off to the moon forever or something along those lines.

The hamsters go in this end and the cans of stew come out the other

XMLicious — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 05:40:07 -0800

What is this machine appearing in a 1950 space exploration movie? From the context, designing a rocket in an engineering office, I would assume that it's some sort of mechanical calculator or mechanical computer. I was hoping that the hive mind could confirm or deny that and give some more specifics - manufacturer, model, is this the same kind of thing as the 50s fire control computers from this MeFi post or maybe a more general-purpose machine?

Attempt no landings.

hanoixan — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:27:58 -0800

Reading about Gingrich's plan to mine the moon, I starting wondering: could the orbital stability of the moon be changed if enough mass was transferred to the Earth? I would expect a heavier Earth, already spinning faster than the moon, would cause an even larger leading force which would accelerate the moon along its trajectory faster than it currently is, causing it to drift away. But I'm definitely no physicist. On what scale would the mass have to change to to have a catastrophic effect, if any?

For the sake of argument, let's define catastrophe as doubling the current speed at which the moon is already moving away from the Earth.

What was going on behind that smily face, anyway?

Narrative Priorities — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:53:10 -0800

I'm trying to get a better understanding for how an AI like GERTY (from the 2009 film Moon) would work under the hood. For one thing, would he be a true AI, or just exceptionally good at analyzing data to spit out appropriate responses? If he is a true AI, what sort might he be? How might his creators have solved the "Friendly AI" problem or prevented him from spiraling off in a singularity-type scenario, wherein his own capabilities increase at a superhuman speed and catapult him outside of our ability to understand or control?

Online articles or in-thread explanations would be excellent! Although please keep in mind that I'm not a computer programmer or engineer myself, and as such there's only so much technical detail I can digest.

Daylight moon.

curious nu — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 11:50:54 -0800

Is it possible for a moon to have an orbit such that it is only ever visible from its planet during daylight hours? If so, what are the necessary requirements for this to happen?

What does a space explosion sound like if you are physically connected to it?

dougrayrankin — Mon, 09 May 2011 15:41:47 -0800

What would an explosion sound like on the moon? Thought-experiment filter. I know that no sound would pass through the (relative) vacuum that is the lunar atmosphere, but would something resembling sound be audible having passed through the lunar surface, into my boots and up my suit to my ears?

I don't want to create the universe, just recreate it.

Ookseer — Sun, 08 May 2011 12:36:57 -0800

I'm looking for usable 3d meshes of Earth, Moon and Mars I know the data is out there for free, but the data I've found is ridiculous (4 terabyte high resolution files), hard to use (5 degree slices that would need to be assembled), in formats that only planetary geologists can use, or simply stuck in the labyrinth of poorly maintained and documented government web sites where I can't find it. It doesn't need to be super high resolution, (buildings no, mountains yes) and I don't need matching image maps, but I do need elevation data. Any common 3d format is acceptable.

If worse comes to worst I can live with a grayscale elevation image that I can use as a displacement map, though I'd rather not for a number of reasons.

Any help or pointers are appreciated.

Pre-moon size of the earth

Sparx — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:41:40 -0800

What was the size of the earth, proportionally to it today, before whatever hit it to create the moon?

Help Me Remember This Moon Game

Sassyfras — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 14:26:07 -0800

Atari or Nintendo video game. It's driving me crazy that I can't remember the name of it. I remember playing a pretty fun video game in the late 80's or early 90's. It was either on Atari or Nintendo. I am pretty sure that "moon" was in the title. I remember that to get to a level you first were flying through space and would land on a moon or a planet. I don't remember what happened after you landed. The graphics were pretty basic - hence I'm thinking it could have been Atari. I don't remember the game being a popular one. Any ideas?

No, this is not a word problem.

zadermatermorts — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:18:41 -0800

I will be riding a train from Chicago to Boston during the upcoming total lunar eclipse. Am I correct that for best viewing, I should sit by the right-side window so as to see the moon in the south sky? Is the moon likely to rise so high that I won't be able to see it at all at its peak from inside a train?

Have a carrot (if you can help me find this article)

bluefly — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 03:58:32 -0800

Some time in the last 8 years I read an article about children's author Margaret Wise Brown. It was a profile about her life (maybe in the context of a book review?), and it was about how depressed she was. I seem to remember her being in an abusive or controlling relationship with an older man or an older woman. It could have been in the New York Times, the New Yorker, or some other major publication. I've tried searching on the newyorker.com and nytimes.com, but didn't find what I wanted (but perhaps I wasn't searching the right way). Can you help me find this article? At least a citation if it's not online?

Moon over Miami - wait, no, over New Orleans

komara — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:01:13 -0800

Astronomers: how to best determine the exact time to take a photograph of the full moon where the moon is situated between two earthly objects? I live in New Orleans. A while back I took this photo and while I like it, I would have loved it had the moon been lower in the sky. Specifically, I would have loved it to be between the two skyscrapers in the middle of the photo (Place St. Charles on the left and One Shell Square on the right).

Here's what I can tell you: I was shooting from the Broad St. overpass above the Pontchartrain Expressway. I do not know the height. I don't even know how much that would matter. I do know the locations of Place St. Charles and One Shell Square, and I do know that the building between the two of them (the more rightmost in my photo, the one with the red light on top of the antenna) is the World Trade Center of New Orleans listed at 407 ft. high, so the moon would have to appear higher than that.

Here's a map to the full setup as best I can tell, showing the shooting location, the two buildings between which the moon should reside, and the location of the building over which the moon should appear.

So, astronomy experts, from the limited information I've provided can you tell me when (or if at all) the full moon will ever appear exactly between those two buildings?

A little lagniappe: here's a time-lapse video of the moon rising over downtown New Orleans, shot from the same location.

One luminary clock

doubtless — Sat, 22 May 2010 17:23:08 -0800

Help me understand the phases of the moon. Why is it that a New Moon is visible at all? Ok, I have what can only be a sort of dumb question about the phases of the moon, that I'm sure everyone else figured out the answer to sometime around the fourth grade. Basically, I think I've never quite understood how the phases of the moon work--I particularly don't get how it's possible for there to be a "New Moon" in the sky, given the way I understand the phases of the moon to work.

The problem is this: Take a look at any typical diagram of the earth, the moon, and the moon's phases. Here's an example. According to such diagrams, the moon is "New" when it's between the earth and the sun. However, when it in this position, it should not be observable by those on the nighttime side of earth, facing away from the sun. Right?

It seems like those on the night side of earth would need to look through the earth to see the moon in it's "new" phase, even if the moon is orbiting on a pretty steep angle.

So...help me here? Have I managed to discredit the Copernican model of the solar system and proved I'm living in a projected Matrix-type world? Or, is there something something a little off in the way I'm thinking about the moon and its orbit? Open to both possibilities. Thanks for any insight.

There will always be a moon over Marin?

DecemberBoy — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:15:10 -0800

I've always wondered about the lyrics to the Dead Kennedys' song "Moon Over Marin". It seems like one would have had to have lived in California in the late 70s-early 80s to get all the references in the song, so I'm hoping someone who did can explain them. Particularly: Was the area of Marin particularly known for pollution? Why Marin? And what is the "uniform with two white stripes" supposed to be? Why is the protagonist exercising in a fenced-off area on a beach? I suspect this all made sense to the intended audience (nobody in punk rock back then thought people would be listening to this stuff for this long and this far outside their local scenes).

Please help me find when the moon disappears, so I can watch it.

Kickstart70 — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:27:55 -0800

Back about a decade ago, I happened to be watching in early evening as the moon went from thin sliver to complete disappearance. It was one of those unexpected and somewhat wondrous moments of my life (due to many circumstances of the time, and the unplanned coolness of it). I'd like to see it again. Is there some schedule for me to tell when this is going to happen again visible from my area? 53N,-122.36W, if that helps.