by Grania
Good morning!
Yes, it’s a supermoon. No, it looks nothing like what some of your more gullible friends on Facebook have been posting.
People of Earth – behold your Supermoon! pic.twitter.com/zrTLZx3WZK
— Andrew Rader (@marsrader) November 14, 2016
Today is the anniversary (1851) of the publication of Moby Dick, and today in 1889 intrepid Nellie Bly set off on her round the world trip in a real life imitation of Jules Verne’s novel.
It’s also the birthdays of not-so-famous composers with deceptively famous names: in 1719 Leopold Mozart (the father of Wolfgang Amadeus) and in 1805 Fanny Mendelssohn (older sister of Felix Mendelssohn), evidently a talented composer who stood little chance of professional success as a woman given the era she lived in.
In Poland Hili is incensed as winter continues uncontested.
Hili: Why is nobody doing anything?
A: What with?
Hili: With all of it.
In Polish:
Hili: Dlaczego nikt nic nie robi?
Ja: Z czym?
Hili: Z tym wszystkim.
Her friend Leon is equally serious, but about a very different matter.
Leon: I will wait here, maybe my friend, Choco, will come back.
Ah! Snow! 🙂
No chance to see any moon tonight – last night it was high & bright in a clear sky but cloud forecast for tonight in Londinium…
Who is Choko?
Choco late?!
A black kitten that came to visit a few weeks ago.
You forgot to mention today’s Google Doodle – Nobel laureate Canadian scientist Sir Frederick Banting –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Banting
I was interested to see Bantings response to being awarded the Nobel:
“Banting and Macleod were jointly awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Banting flew into a rage that he would share the Prize with Macleod, whom he felt had not contributed enough to deserve the Prize. He eventually decided to split his half of the Prize money with Best. In response, Macleod split the other half of the Prize money with James Collip.”
People have a strong attachment to dates and anniversaries. The supermoon will not be noticeably larger tonight than it was last night. But the naming of a single day when it’s THE brightest seems to mean a lot. The same with the millennium. It was based on a particular man-made arbitrary calendar yet the magic of a specific date is held as vital. Celebrations ensue. And I remind you, as I do every year on this date, to get off my lawn!
AIUI the moon’s been waxing over the last few nights (which is the logic behind calling tonight “the” night). So, while the diameter tonight is going to be exactly the same as the diameter last night, the brightness and square centimeters of moon visible in the sky will be higher, simply because of the phase.
I wasn’t following ‘supermoon’ news at all last month, yet the October full moon was noticeably brighter and clearer to me than the September one. Though part of that may simply be timing; the October moon was staring at me through the windshield as I drove to work. So I will probably intentionally go out tonight when its supposed to show up on the horizon, just to see how it looks.
This morn, I and I suspect many Americans, need Hili’s dialogue very much. Thanks for a good one with layers of meanings.
The super moon is small change. What I’m waiting to see is the Great American Solar Eclipse, which is to take place around mid-day, Aug. 21, 2017. A total eclipse lasting about 2 1/2 minutes will follow a line running diagonally across the US from Salem,OR to Charleston, SC.
Have the end-of-the-world idiots started coming out of the woodwork yet?
The NZ earthquakes are being blamed on it in the usual tinfoil-hat quarters.
(Actually, the idea that the moon could trigger earthquakes is not 100% physically impossible. If it can raise tides by 3m, then presumably it could do the same to rock if it were flexible enough – with the result that it could induce stresses in large rock masses. Only thing is, the stresses would be minuscule compared with the stresses from other causes such as plate movement.
So while I want to call it woo, it’s not quite demonstrably 100% pure unadulterated woo, worse luck).
There was a publication just a few weeks ago (Nature GeoScience ; I have the PDF if anyone is interested) where they showed a modest correlation between the strongest (Mw > ~8.2) earthquakes and the orientation of their slip planes w.r.t the tidal stress at the time of rupture. That’s a quake between about 10 and 50 times more energetic than the 2016-11-13 11:02:58 UTC quake. Which is interesting.
OTOH, that’s also the first time that I’ve seen a reasonably-accepted demonstration of a significant relationship between phase of the Moon (well, tidal stress – not quite the same thing) and the first such proposed relationship (Schuster, A. “On lunar and solar periodicities of earthquakes.” Proc.R.Soc.Lond. 61, 455–465 (1897).
Coincidentally, I was spending far too much of yesterday trying to get my head around Darwin’s work on tidal deformation of noon-rigid bodies. George Darwin, not Chas.
Your link to the ?Culverden quake? ( ?Waiau quake? ?Hanmer quake? – what are we going to call it?)
http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/earthquake.php?id=545040#map
is interesting. Though the reports from further away are going to be muchly confused by the following quakes (‘aftershocks’ doesn’t seem quite the right word since they weren’t in the same location) further to the north around Seddon. In fact Wellington got far more shaken up than it did in the Seddon earthquake of a few months ago.
The reference at that link relates only to the first 7.9 quake, I’m trying to find the later ones on it but not having much success.
Hmmm, according to geonet.org.nz, they just had a 4.6, 20km south of Seddon, about an hour ago. So it’s still grumbling away…
https://www.geonet.org.nz/quakes/felt/strong
Just sorting out the biggest ones, they had *THE* 7.5 at Waiau 15km NE of Culverden at 12.02a.m. (on the 14th); 5.6 at Culverden at 12.16; 6.2 15km north of Kaikoura (30 miles north-east of Waiau) at 12.32; 6.0 in the same place at 2.31; 5.1 at Kaikoura at 6.17am; a whole splattering of 5+’s around Seddon, 40 miles NE of Kaikoura (biggest a 5.7), all morning; then reversing the north-east trend, a 6.3 at 1.34 pm midway between Culverden and Kaikoura; and a whole swag of 5+’s around Kaikoura…
If the Christchurch quake was G*d targeting Chch with pinpoint accuracy, this time He’s using a pump-action shotgun…
cr
I’m still getting a voice alarm from the EMSC several times a day for aftershocks from the recent Appenine earthquake. I guess they use some sort of distance filtering, because I don’t recall getting more than a couple from NZ.
I went out last night to see it. It was very beautiful, but I think the only reason why I thought it was a bit bigger was because I knew it was supposed to be a bit bigger.
The eye sees what the mind knows.
It gets much bigger near the horizon, when it’s low in the sky so closer to Earth 😉
cr
You won’t believe these 25 celebrities whose lives are being changed by the super-moon!!!!