Let's howl at the super-sized moon on Saturday

Well, maybe not here in my part of the world where the rains have been soaking through and through; but, then, this is Oregon!

Apparently our moon will come closest to us--yes, really up close and personal.

An exceptional celestial treat is in store for sky gazers as ‘supermoon’, the biggest and brightest full moon of the year which will be closest to Earth in 18 years, will be seen in the night sky on Saturday.

“The ‘supermoon’ will be closest to the Earth in 18 years tomorrow and will appear to be the biggest and brightest of 2011, Director of Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) C.B. Devgun said on Friday.

Saturday’s full moon will be around 10 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter as compared to other full moons during the year, he said.

The term ‘Supermoon’ was first coined by Astrologer Richard Nolle in 1979. According to him, it is a situation when the moon is slightly closer to the Earth in its orbit than average, which is 90 per cent or more of its closest orbit, and the moon is a full or new moon.

Why does the size of the moon increase like this?

because the size of the moon's orbit varies slightly, each perigee is not always the same distance away from Earth. Friday's supermoon will be just 221,566 miles (356,577 kilometers) away from Earth. The last time the full moon approached so close to Earth was in 1993, according to NASA.

However, ...

Though the supermoon will be about 20 percent brighter and 15 percent bigger than a regular full moon, the visual effect may be subtle, added Anthony Cook, astronomical observer for the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
"I doubt that most people will notice anything unusual about this full moon," Cook said.
"Because the total amount of light is a little greater, the biggest effect will be on the illumination of the ground—but not enough to be very noticeable to the casual observer."

Naturally, there are people ready to link the super-moon to the catastrophic tsunami in Japan.  That kind of talk is the real March Madness!

Alone in a darkening space

when future astronomers look to the sky, they will no longer witness the past. The past will have drifted beyond the cliffs of space. Observations will reveal nothing but an endless stretch of inky black stillness

Why so?  Because the universe is expanding at faster and faster rates, writes Brian Greene:

A hundred billion years from now, any galaxy that’s not resident in our neighborhood will have been swept away by swelling space for so long that it will be racing from us at faster than the speed of light. (Although nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light, there’s no limit on how fast space itself can expand.)
Light emitted by such galaxies will therefore fight a losing battle to traverse the rapidly widening gulf that separates us. The light will never reach Earth and so the galaxies will slip permanently beyond our capacity to see, regardless of how powerful our telescopes may become.

Greene, who came to our campus a few years ago, presents a very depressing situation; well, depressing to me:

If astronomers in the far future have records handed down from our era, attesting to an expanding cosmos filled with galaxies, they will face a peculiar choice: Should they believe “primitive” knowledge that speaks of a cosmos very much at odds with what anyone has seen for billions and billions of years? Or should they focus on their own observations and valiantly seek explanations for an island universe containing a small cluster of galaxies floating within an unchanging sea of darkness — a conception of the cosmos that we know definitively to be wrong?
And what if future astronomers have no such records, perhaps because on their planet scientific acumen developed long after the deep night sky faded to black? For them, the notion of an expanding universe teeming with galaxies would be a wholly theoretical construct, bereft of empirical evidence.

Hmmm ....