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BLUE MOON ON NEW YEAR'S
EVE: This Thursday, Dec. 31st, for the first
time in almost twenty years, there's going to be a Blue Moon
on New Year's Eve. Get the full
story and party tips from Science@NASA.
SUNSPOT SURGE:
2009 is ending with a flurry of sunspots. Indeed, if sunspot
1039 holds together just one more day (prediction: it will),
the month of December will accumulate a total of 22 spotted
days and the final tally for the year will look like this:
The dark line is a linear least-squares fit to the data.
If the trend continues exactly as shown (prediction: it won't),
sunspots will become a non-stop daily occurance no later than
February 2011. Blank suns would cease and solar minimum would
be over.
If the past two years have taught us anything, however, it
is that the sun can be tricky and unpredictable. Stay tuned
for surprises.
BLUE MOON ECLIPSE:
On Dec. 31st, the Blue
Moon will dip into Earth's shadow for a partial lunar
eclipse. The event is visible from Europe, Africa and Asia:
map. At maximum eclipse, around 19:24 Universal Time, approximately
8% of the Moon will be darkly shadowed. Click on the image
to launch an animated preview:
Blue
Moons are rare (once every ~2.5 years). Blue Moons on New
Year's Eve are rarer still (once every ~19 years). How rare
is a lunar eclipse of a Blue Moon on New Year's Eve?
A search of NASA's Five
Millennium Catalogue of Lunar Eclipses provides an approximate
answer. In the next 1000 years, Blue Moons on New Year's Eve
will be eclipsed only 11 times (once every ~91 years). So
this is a rare event, indeed.
December
Northern Lights Gallery
[previous Decembers: 2008,
2007, 2006,
2005, 2001,
2000]
Explore
the Sunspot Cycle |
