The Skies as Clark Kent

Related: They’re Magically Suspicious • It’s SuperMoon!
• This Is Going to Hurt You More than It Hurts Me

Neil Armstrong 1930-2012

We’ve lost Neil Armstrong to the stars at the age of 81.


Neil Armstrong in the Eagle module after the moonwalk.
Photo: Buzz Aldrin for NASA.

An obituary up on the NASA website includes excerpts from and links to statements from the Armstrong family, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, and President Barack Obama. The page also has embedded video of Armstrong and links to information on the historic moon landing of July 20th, 1969.

It’s SuperMoon!

Full moons have a hold over me, and not just in a vague gravitational sense.


Photo: NASA — Sean Smith

I get entranced by them — cool silver or fiery gold, low on the horizon or high among the stars, but especially, to echo what I wrote a couple of years ago during a lovely Buck Moon, when they come as the moon is essentially at perigee, its closest point to Earth in its elliptical orbit. (As I’m sure we all learned once upon a time, neither the orbit of our moon around Earth nor that of Earth around the sun is an exact circle; rather, they are very slight ovals.)

The Doodles Abide

Google’s logo of the day is a weird one. I wish you luck clicking on it to find out what it represents...



There have been a few articles speculating on its meaning, but I suspect we won’t hear anything from official sources for a while yet.

Luna Ranger

My last post was about the moon. This one is about the new film Moon, directed by Duncan Jones.

It opens with an in-story promotional video explaining that an isotope of helium abundant on the moon is now mined there to provide much of Earth’s power. The lone man monitoring the collection of the isotope is Sam Bell, played by Sam Rockwell. A robotic apparatus called Gerty is his only company; with satellite communications down Sam can’t even talk to his employers at Lunar Industries, let alone his wife and daughter, in real time. Thankfully his three-year hitch, darn near driving him crazy, is almost up. Or maybe it’s driven him crazy already? (Gerty is voiced by Kevin Spacey in
a tone akin to that of 2001’s HAL, adding to its potential menace.)

Moon Shot

The moon was big and lovely the other night.



I didn’t check, but it may have been at its perigee, the point at which its elliptical
orbit brings it closest to us. That word and its opposite, apogee, refer to any planetary body in relation to Earth, not specifically the moon, and they’ve stuck with me since my highly enjoyable 6th-grade astronomy/geology class. Likewise, the more euphonious terms for our proximity to the sun over the course of Earth’s annual revolution: perihelion and aphelion (pronounced not “app-heel-yin” but “uh-feel-yin”; think the Irene Cara song from Flashdance). Wikipedia gives terminology for the distances of objects orbiting various heavenly bodies at the entry for apsis, and there are a trinity
of pairings variously used to describe something — a NASA lunar shuttle, say — in orbit around the moon.