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For a few hours on the night of Dec. 20 to Dec. 21, the attention of tens of millions of people will be drawn skyward, where the mottled, coppery globe of our moon will hang completely immersed in the long, tapering cone of shadow cast out into space by our Earth. If the weather is clear, favorably placed skywatchers will have a view of one of nature's most beautiful spectacles: a total eclipse of the moon.

Unlike a total eclipse of the sun, which is only visible to those in the path of totality, eclipses of the moon can usually be observed from one's own backyard. The passage of the moon through the Earth's shadow is equally visible from all places within the hemisphere where the moon is above the horizon.

The total phase of the upcoming event will be visible across all of North and South America, as well as the northern and western part of Europe, and a small part of northeast Asia, including Korea and much of Japan. Totality will also be visible in its entirety from the North Island of New Zealand and Hawaii — a potential viewing audience of about 1.5 billion people. This will be the first opportunity from any place on earth to see the moon undergo a total eclipse in 34 months. [Amazing photos of a total lunar eclipse]

This star chart shows where in the sky the upcoming lunar eclipse will appear. And check this NASA lunar eclipse chart to see how visible the eclipse will be from different regions around the world.

Stages of the eclipse

There is nothing complicated about viewing this celestial spectacle. Unlike an eclipse of the sun, which necessitates special viewing precautions in order to avoid eye damage, an eclipse of the moon is perfectly safe to watch. All you'll need to watch are your eyes, but binoculars or a telescope will give a much nicer view.

The eclipse will actually begin when the moon enters the faint outer portion, or penumbra, of the Earth's shadow a little over an hour before it begins moving into the umbra. The penumbra, however, is all but invisible to the eye until the moon becomes deeply immersed in it. Sharp-eyed viewers may get their first glimpse of the penumbra as a faint smudge on the left part of the moon's disk at or around 6:15 UT (on Dec. 21) which corresponds to 1:15 a.m. Eastern Time or 10:15 p.m. Pacific Time (on Dec. 20).

The most noticeable part of this eclipse will come when the moon begins to enter the Earth's dark inner shadow (called the umbra). A small scallop of darkness will begin to appear on the moon's left edge at 6:33 UT (on Dec. 21) corresponding to 1:33 a.m. EST or 10:33 p.m. PST (on Dec. 20).

The moon is expected to take 3 hours and 28 minutes to pass completely through the umbra.

The total phase of the eclipse will last 72 minutes beginning at 7:41 UT (on Dec. 21), corresponding to 2:41 a.m. EST or 11:41 p.m. PST (on Dec. 20).

At the moment of mid-totality (8:17 UT/3:17 a.m. EST/12:17 a.m. PST), the moon will stand directly overhead from a point in the North Pacific Ocean about 800 miles (1,300 km) west of La Paz, Mexico.

The moon will pass entirely out of the Earth's umbra at 10:01 UT/5:01 a.m. EST/2:01 a.m. PST and the last evidence of the penumbra should vanish about 15 or 20 minutes later.

Color and brightness in question

During totality, although the moon will be entirely immersed in the Earth's shadow, it likely will not disappear from sight. Rather, it should appear to turn a coppery red color, a change caused by the Earth's atmosphere bending or refracting sunlight into the shadow.

Since the Earth's shadow is cone-shaped and extends out into space for about 844,000 miles (1,358,000 km), sunlight will be strained through a sort of "double sunset," all around the rim of the Earth, into its shadow and then onto the moon.

However, because of the recent eruptions of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano last spring and the Merapi volcano in Indonesia in October, one and possibly even two clouds of ash and dust might be floating high above the Earth. As a result, the moon may appear darker than usual during this eclipse; during totality, parts of the moon might even become black and invisible.

A careful description of the colors seen on the totally eclipsed moon and their changes is valuable. The hues depend on the optical equipment used, usually appearing more vivid with the naked eye than in telescopes. The French astronomer Andre-Louis Danjon introduced the following five-point scale of lunar luminosity ("L") to classify eclipses:

L = 0: Very dark eclipse, moon almost invisible, especially in mid-totality.

L = 1: Dark eclipse, gray or brownish coloration, details distinguishable only with difficulty.

L = 2: Deep red or rust-colored eclipse, with a very dark central part in the shadow, and outer edge of the umbra relatively bright.

L = 3: Brick red eclipse, usually with a bright or yellow rim to the shadow.

L = 4: Very bright copper-red or orange eclipse, with a bluish very bright shadow rim.

Examine the moon at mid-totality and also near the beginning and end of totality to get an impression of both the inner and outer umbra. In noting an L observation, state the time and optical means (naked eye, binoculars or telescope) that is used. We invite readers to e-mail their Danjon estimate for this eclipse (along with any pictures they'd like to share) to cmoskowitz-at-SPACE.com.

At mid-totality, from rural locations far from city lights, the darkness of the sky is impressive. Faint stars and the Milky Way will appear, and the surrounding landscape will take on a somber hue. As totality ends, the eastern edge of the moon begins to emerge from the umbra, and the sequence of events repeats in reverse order until the spectacle is over.

Fringe effects

Interestingly, from most of New Zealand, a slice of northeast Australia, Papua, New Guinea, southwest Japan and Korea, the moon will rise during totality on the evening of Dec. 21. Because of low altitude and bright evening twilight, observers in these locations may not see much of the moon at all until it begins to emerge from out of the Earth's shadow.

Conversely, much of the United Kingdom and parts of western and northern Europe will see the moon set during totality on the morning of Dec. 21. Because of low altitude and bright morning twilight, observers in these locations may not see much of the moon at all after it slips completely into the Earth's shadow.

Past and future

The last total lunar eclipse occurred on Feb. 20 to Feb. 21, 2008 and was visible from most of the Americas, as well as Europe, much of Africa and western Asia. In 2011, there will be two total lunar eclipses. The first, on June 15, will be visible primarily from the Eastern Hemisphere and will have an unusually long duration of totality lasting one hour and 40 minutes.

Another total lunar eclipse will occur on Dec. 10 and will be visible over the western half of North America before moonset. For the next total lunar eclipse that will be visible across all of North America, we must wait until April 14 to April 15, 2014.

Gah! A shame I won't be able to see it. I live in southern Nevada (USA), which is currently enjoying day 3 of rain showers and cloud cover.

A giant cache of nearly 20,000 fossil reptiles, shellfish and a host of other prehistoric creatures unearthed from a mountain in China is now revealing how life recovered after the most devastating mass extinction on Earth.

This research could help point out which species might be more or less susceptible to extinction nowadays, and how the world might recover from the damage caused by humanity, scientists added.

Life was nearly completely wiped out approximately 250 million years ago by massive volcanic eruptions and devastating global warming. Only one in 10 species survived this cataclysmic end-Permian event.

Much was uncertain regarding the steps life took to piece itself back together after this disaster, or even how long it took. Now the clearest picture yet of this recovery has been discovered by a team of researchers, who excavated away half a mountain in Luoping in southwest China to unearth thousands of marine fossils, the first fully functional ecosystem seen after the end-Permian.

"The pattern and timing of recovery can tell us something about how life today might recover after human-induced crises," said researcher Michael Benton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England.

A trove of fossils

The 50-foot-thick (16 meters) layer of limestone that held these fossils dates back to when south China was a large island just north of the equator with a tropical climate. A smattering of fossil land plants suggest this marine community lived near a conifer forest.

The fossils are exceptionally well-preserved, with more than half of them completely intact, including soft tissues. Apparently they were protected across the ages by mats of microbes that rapidly sealed their bodies off from decay after death.

"Soft tissues can give us more profound information about larger patterns of evolution and relationships, such as the feathers on dinosaurs," Benton said. "Soft tissues in some of the marine creatures may help us understand diet and locomotion."

Ninety percent of the fossils are bug-like creatures, such as crustaceans, millipedes and horseshoe crabs. Fish make up 4 percent, including the "living fossil" known as the coelacanth, which is still alive today nearly 250 million years later. Snails, bivalves (creatures including clams and oysters), squid-like belemnoids, nautilus-like ammonoids and other mollusks make up about 2 percent of the fossils.

The largest creature the scientists found was a thalattosaur, a marine reptile about 10 feet (3 meters) in length, which would have preyed on the larger fishes there, which reached lengths of about 3 feet (1 m). Other predatory marine reptiles the scientists found include dolphin-bodied ichthyosaurs.

"Every time we find a new site like this, we get closer to what life in the past was really like," Benton told LiveScience.

A long time to heal

This extraordinarily detailed snapshot of a diverse bygone ecosystem reveals that life took a long time to heal from the massive damage it received - 10 million years, which is even more than it took life to recover after the K-T event that claimed the dinosaurs.

"Recovery after most mass extinctions, including the K-T, seems to have taken 1 million to 4 million years," Benton said. "The end-Permian event was so profound, killing perhaps 90 percent of species, that ecosystems had nothing left to hang their structure on."

"The importance of the discovery that ecosystems took 10 million years to recover completely reflects the unequalled severity of the event," Benton said.

Some marine animals such as the ammonoids did recover fast, within 1 million to 2 million years, but "physical environmental conditions continued to suffer setbacks for the 4 million to 5 million years of the Early Triassic, with four or five pulses of sudden heating and ocean stagnation," Benton said, referring to severe climate changes and reduced ocean water circulation. "The Luoping site and evidence from older locations in south China shows that ecosystems in total had not recovered until some 10 million years after the crisis."

The researchers now plan to explore the recovery over the ecosystem's entire life span to see which species recovered when and how the food web rebuilt itself. In addition, "we hope to now explore all the amazing fossil organisms from Luoping - this has only just begun and will take many years to document in detail," Benton said.

The scientists, led by Shixue Hu of the Chengdu Geological Center in western China, detailed their findings online Dec. 22 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Pretty cool...

Wow! Those are really cool. I like the Alice in Wonderland and Enchanted Garden ones the best.

Maiandra wrote:Wow! Those are really cool. I like the Alice in Wonderland and Enchanted Garden ones the best.

It was the Alice one that first caught my attention, as I dig the Cheshire Cat.

Modern technology in practice in Eindhoven, this afternoon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oOFkChETks

(The driver said he paid close attention to the directions his navigational system gave him.)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A team of divers say they've discovered the remains of the USS Revenge, a ship commanded by U.S. Navy hero Oliver Hazard Perry and wrecked off Rhode Island in 1811. Perry is known for defeating the British in the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie off the shores of Ohio, Michigan and Ontario in the War of 1812 and for the line "I have met the enemy and they are ours." His battle flag bore the phrase "Don't give up the ship," and to this day is a symbol of the Navy.

The divers, Charles Buffum, a brewery owner from Stonington, Conn., and Craig Harger, a carbon dioxide salesman from Colchester, Conn., say the wreck changed the course of history because Perry likely would not have been sent to Lake Erie otherwise. Sunday is the 200th anniversary of the wreck.

Buffum said he's been interested in finding the remains of the Revenge ever since his mother several years ago gave him the book "Shipwrecks on the Shores of Westerly." The book includes Perry's account of the wreck, which happened when it hit a reef in a storm in heavy fog off Watch Hill in Westerly as Perry was bringing the ship from Newport to New London, Conn.

"I always thought to myself we ought to go out and have a look and just see if there's anything left," Buffum said.

The two, along with a third man, Mike Fournier, set out to find it with the aid of a metal detector. After several dives, they came across a cannon, then another.

"It was just thrilling," Harger said.

They made their first discovery in August 2005, and kept it secret as they continued to explore the area and make additional discoveries. Since then, they have found four more 42-inch-long cannons, an anchor, canister shot, and other metal objects that they say they're 99 percent sure were from the Revenge.

Buffum and Harger say the items fit into the time period that the Revenge sank, the anchor appears to be the main one that is known to have been cut loose from the ship, and that no other military ships with cannons have been recorded as sinking in the area.

They have not discovered a ship's bell or anything else that identifies it as the Revenge, and all the wood has disappeared, which is not unusual for a wreck that old, they said.

The Navy has a right to salvage its shipwrecks, and the two say they've contacted the Naval History & Heritage Command, which oversees such operations, in hopes the Navy will salvage the remains. A spokesman for the command did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

If the Navy does not, they said they hope to raise the money for a salvage operation so the artifacts can be displayed at a historical society.

They say they are concerned now that they are going public that other divers might try to remove objects from the site, which is a violation of the law. Many of the objects they found are in only 15 feet of water, although the area is difficult to dive because of currents, they said.

As for whether the wreck of the Revenge changed the course of history, David Skaggs, a professor emeritus of history at Bowling Green State University, said Perry might not put it that way. Skaggs has written two books on Perry, "A Signal Victory," about the Lake Erie campaign, which he co-authored, and a biography, "Oliver Hazard Perry: Honor, Courage, and Patriotism in the Early U.S Navy."

While Harger and Buffum say Perry was effectively demoted by being sent to the Great Lakes rather than getting another high seas command, Skaggs said the Great Lakes commission still gave Perry great prestige. Perry, a Rhode Island native, became known as the "Hero of Lake Erie" after he defeated a British squadron, becoming the first U.S. commander to do so.

"Whether or not there is another officer that could have done as well as Perry did is one of those 'might-have-beens' that historians are not prone to ask," Skaggs said.

Still, Skaggs said he was intrigued by the discovery.

"It is certainly an interesting new find on the eve of the bicentennial of the War of 1812," he said.

Found Inside The Dinosaur Egg: http://www.ktre.com/global/Category.asp ... nerclipid=

LUFKIN, TX (KTRE) – It's a collection millions of years of years in the making. Dr. Neal Naranjo has spent vacations digging up fossils, and building a collection that includes six dinosaur eggs.

"There had been a study done in Florida by a physician at a hospital looking at velaciraptor egg," said Dr. Neal Naranjo.

That study sparked his interest to see what was inside his eggs.

"Tried an x-ray but the material is just too dense for a normal x-ray... Tried an MRI because they don't have water in them you can't do an MRI," said Naranjo.

Determined not to give up, he turned to the radiology team at Woodland Heights Diagnostic Center.

"This is a very unusual request for us. It's our first time to scan non-human subjects," said Rebecca Petty, Radiology Director.

Petty was on board, and confident in her cat-scan equipment.

"I knew if there was something to be seen we could see it with a CT Scanner," said Petty.

Carefully, these pre-historic eggs were scanned one-by-one.

"Then we're slicing through and I mean seeing image after image. This one shows up, I go we got a baby! We got a baby! We're jumping up and down!" said Naranjo.

The dinosaur eggs hold fetuses that are at least 70 million years old. The most shocking thing for Dr. Naranjo and his team were the detailed images that the cat-scan revealed."

"We thought we could see some bone structures but to see the whole outline of the baby in the egg was amazing," said Petty.

"Vertebrae. I mean even the lay-man can tell that's a vertebrae, that's a vertebrae," said Naranjo.

It's a rare look into the past that's catching world-wide attention.

"We got people contacting me from Europe, the states, wanting to know how we did it, what was our protocols, how can they do it? Can they send stuff for us to do?" said Naranjo.

It's this drive that Dr. Naranjo hopes will inspire others to follow their dreams and make history in their own way.

"This guy born and raised in Lufkin, Texas - He's doing this. He's not somebody on TV - the History Channel. He's a local guy," said Naranjo.

Construction plans for a science museum in Lufkin are underway. Dr. Naranjo plans to build next to Pineywoods Home Health Care on South First.

The eggs, and the images of the dinosaurs are only be part of his vast fossil collection.

WASHINGTON – The Hubble Space Telescope got its first peek at a mysterious giant green blob in outer space and found that it's strangely alive. The bizarre glowing blob is giving birth to new stars, some only a couple million years old, in remote areas of the universe where stars don't normally form.

The blob of gas was first discovered by a Dutch school teacher in 2007 and is named Hanny's Voorwerp (HAN'-nee's-FOR'-vehrp). Voorwerp is Dutch for object.

NASA released the new Hubble photo Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

Parts of the green blob are collapsing and the resulting pressure from that is creating the stars. The stellar nurseries are outside of a normal galaxy, which is usually where stars live.

[Related: NASA finds first Earth-like planet outside our solar system]

That makes these "very lonely newborn stars" that are "in the middle of nowhere," said Bill Keel, the University of Alabama astronomer who examined the blob.

The blob is the size of our own Milky Way galaxy and it is 650 million light years away. Each light year is about 6 trillion miles.

The blob is mostly hydrogen gas swirling from a close encounter of two galaxies and it glows because it is illuminated by a quasar in one of the galaxies. A quasar is a bright object full of energy powered by a black hole.

The blob was discovered by elementary school teacher Hanny van Arkel, who was 24 at the time, as part of a worldwide Galaxy Zoo project where everyday people can look at archived star photographs to catalog new objects.

Van Arkel said when she first saw the odd object in 2007 it appeared blue and smaller. The Hubble photo provides a clear picture and better explanation for what is happening around the blob.

"It actually looked like a blue smudge," van Arkel told The Associated Press. "Now it looks like dancing frog in the sky because it's green." She says she can even see what passes for arms and eyes.

Since van Arkel's discovery, astronomers have looked for similar gas blobs and found 18 of them. But all of them are about half the size of Hanny's Voorwerp, Keel said.

___

Online:

Hubble Space Telescope: http://www.spacetelescope.org/

Galaxy Zoo project: http://www.galaxyzoo.org

Antimatter from thunderstorms on Earth:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12158718

Collector wrote:Ice and snow sculptures

Dude. Some of those are epic. Remind me of the sand ones I posted...

Wow, that's really "ice" work. They "snow" how to do a good job!

DeadPoolX wrote:Wow, that's really "ice" work. They "snow" how to do a good job!

Are you OK?