A commercial airliner flies Northwest across Lake Michigan in front of the "Full Buck" supermoon, the first of four supermoons in 2023, July 3, 2023, in Chicago. The cosmos is offering up a double feature in August: a pair of supermoons. Catch the first show Tuesday night, Aug. 2, as the full moon rises in the southeast. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)
The cosmos is offering up a double feature in August: a pair of supermoons culminating in a rare blue moon.
Catch the first show Tuesday evening as the full moon rises in the southeast, appearing slightly brighter and bigger than normal. That’s because it will be closer than usual, just 222,159 miles (357,530 kilometers) away, thus the supermoon label.
The moon will be even closer the night of Aug. 30 — a scant 222,043 miles (357,344 kilometers) distant. Because it’s the second full moon in the same month, it will be what's called a blue moon.
“Warm summer nights are the ideal time to watch the full moon rise in the eastern sky within minutes of sunset. And it happens twice in August,” said retired NASA astrophysicist Fred Espenak, dubbed Mr. Eclipse for his eclipse-chasing expertise.
The last time two full supermoons graced the sky in the same month was in 2018. It won’t happen again until 2037, according to Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project.
Masi will provide a live webcast of Tuesday evening’s supermoon, as it rises over the Coliseum in Rome.
“My plans are to capture the beauty of this ... hopefully bringing the emotion of the show to our viewers,” Masi said in an email.
“The supermoon offers us a great opportunity to look up and discover the sky,” he added.
This year’s first supermoon was in July. The fourth and last will be in September. The two in August will be closer than either of those.
Provided clear skies, binoculars or backyard telescopes can enhance the experience, Espenak said, revealing such features as lunar maria — the dark plains formed by ancient volcanic lava flows — and rays emanating from lunar craters.
According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the August full moon is traditionally known as the sturgeon moon. That’s because of the abundance of that fish in the Great Lakes in August, hundreds of years ago.
Bioscience and genetic engineering company, Colossal, raised $60 million in a Series A funding round. Colossal is focused on developing new technologies and genetic tools to restore extinct species, and protect critically endangered species. One of the startup's long-term goals is to resurrect the woolly mammoth, and return it back to the arctic. Colossal also says it is developing technology that expands beyond animals, and has the potential to advance human health. Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Residents were cleaning their homes Thursday after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Fukushima in northern Japan, smashing furniture, knocking out power and killing four people.
A New Zealand couple who believed they had dug up the world’s largest potato had their dreams turned to mash after Guinness World Records wrote to say that scientific testing had found it wasn’t, in fact, a potato after all.
Two years into the pandemic, many of us have regained a sense of normalcy. However, those in the healthcare industry are still confronting the virus every day, dealing with the physical, mental and psychological stress of the ongoing pandemic. Ben Mirtes, CFO of Ingenovis Health and Lydia Mobley, a travel nurse with Faststaff, who has spent the last two years going from hotspot to hotspot, joined Cheddar’s Opening Bell to reflect on their experiences in healthcare, and discuss why they are optimistic about a path forward.
Catching you up on what you Need to Know on March 16, 2022, with updates on Ukraine and Russia, a container ship gets stuck in the Chesapeake Bay, Disney employees stage a walkout over the "Don't Say Gay" law in Florida, and NASA completes its first spacewalk of 2022.
Food technology startup Tender Food raised $12 million in a seed round led by Chris Sacca's Lowercarbon Capital. Tender says it specializes in creating alternative meats with an authentic texture and is on a mission to make alternative meats so delicious, nutritious, and affordable, that eating meat from animals will no longer make sense. Christophe Chantre, co-founder & CEO of Tender Food, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Ryan Shearman, chief alchemist and co-founder at Aether, and Henry Elkus, founder of Helena, join Cheddar News to talk about the completion of an $18 million Series A funding round led by Helena.
As the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to grow, so do concerns over the impact it could have on the international space community, and more specifically, the International Space Station. Those concerns come after Dmitry Rogozin, the director of Russia's state space agency, posted several tweets over the last few weeks in which he threatened to 'destroy Russia's cooperation on the ISS.' Olympia LePoint, rocket scientist and author of 'Answers Unleashed II: The Science of Attracting What You Want,' joined Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
