Supermoon today! Dust off your pearly winkerpeepers, biggest one for decades! If you have a small telescope or binoculars, it will look amazing. Check it out early evening, slightly Northeast right after sunset, or early morning in the West before sunrise (when this posts Tues eve, it will be well up in the East almost overhead). If you look Wed. evening, the Full Supermoon will appear right after sunset in the Northeast and 20 degrees up, or if you're an early riser 5-6AM in the West 15o). If you catch it early evening or morning close to the horizon, whatever dust or smoke is in the air should give it some yellow/orange color. It will also appear somewhat fatter due to atmospheric refraction, similar to the setting sun. It's an optical illusion, but looks cool!
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Hi, I’m Itzl!
As you can see by Itzl's concerned look, this group (Itzl Alert Network or IAN) is for us to check in at to let people know we are alive, doing OK, and not affected by such things as heat, blizzards, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, power outages, or other things that could keep us off DKos. If you're not here, or anywhere else on DKos, and there are adverse conditions in your area (floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, etc.), we are going to check up on you. If you are going to be away from your computer for a day or a week, let us know here. We care! Send us a DM if you want to publish a diary or have a cause to share. Head site admins FLSNMom at www.dailykos.com/… or Art Ah Zen at www.dailykos.com/…
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Supermoons are when the Moon is at Perigee (closest approach) in its elliptical orbit around the Earth. Today, Wed. Nov. 5 is the biggest Supermoon in this year's series of 4! (We've had one each in Sep/Oct and will have one more in early December, but November is the largest). It’s the biggest one (closest to earth) we will see until Nov. 25, 2034. The biggest of the 21st Century will occur Dec. 6, 2052. Most of us won’t see that but — tell your grandkids to mark the date!
If you got rained out wait a couple days, it's still going to be sizable. Or catch the next one December 4-5. And don’t forget to keep looking up! Even in city skies, this one will look awesome!
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So, is this thing you’ve heard in the news called 2025 PN7 an actual new Mini-Moon of Earth, or just another Quasi-Satellite? (Important distinction.)
Mini-Moons are when one of Earth’s Quasi-Satellites actually orbits around us briefly, rather than merely shadowing us around the sun (and appearing to orbit us, as its own orbit gets tugged by earth’s gravity into a back-and forth resonance). However, actual Mini-Moons do sling around the earth-moon system, for a short time. They tend to get ejected by our system because they’re much smaller than the earth or moon, making their orbits dynamically unstable according to the Three-Body Problem (in the restricted formulation where m3 is arbitrarily small, the system is chaotic - depending on the Jacobi Integral, the mini-moon may circle the earth for a time, then our moon, and then be ejected via one of our unstable Lagrange Points, L1, L2 or L3).
Here’s a good short video with Dr. Kirsten Banks, an Australian astrophysicist, explaining it briefly and well: www.youtube.com/…
Below is the more detailed version with Canadian mathematician and astronomy teacher Anton Petrov, which gets into the orbits and technical stuff… but he also explains it very well: Tadpole orbits (the convoluted green shapes below), Horseshoe orbits (when NEOs trade between earth’s Libration points) and Trojan satellites (of which earth actually has a couple at our stable L4 Lagrange point). This newly discovered 2025 PN7 is only the latest in a raft of Quasi-Moons shadowing the earth! And it’s been following us around like a lost puppy for at least 60 years. It’s part of the group of Near-Earth Asteroids called the Arjunas*, and will be with us for another 60 yrs or so. Not to worry, it’s quite small and presents little danger (about city-bus size). It was discovered by the PanSTARRS telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii on Aug. 2, 2025. Good work! PanSTARRS is expressly designed to track and discover new Near-Earth-Objects, mostly asteroids like the Arjunas, that could potentially be a threat to us. They are NEOs with a 1:1 mean-motion resonance with earth, either leading or following us around the sun, in somewhat more pronounced ellipses than ours (which makes them 'appear' to go around us).
*Historical note: These are named after Arjuna, the central hero of the Mahabarata. In Oppenheimer’s famous later interview on the atom bomb test, when he says “...and then Lord Krishna exhorted the Prince to do his duty [fight]… I suppose we all felt something like that.” The 'Prince' referred to was Arjuna, a reluctant warrior due to his Brahmin nature. He entered the battle on the side of good in the Bhagavad-Gita. Let’s hope all the Arjunas stay on our good side, thanks to PanSTARRS!
The above chyron should say: in apparent orbit. From here on earth they appear to go around us, but actually their orbits around the sun shadow Earth's, and they have 'stretchier' ellipses, making them seem to go around as they play catch-up and go with the earth in a resonant pattern. Hence they are called almost-moons, or Quasi-moons/Quasi-satellites.
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Hope everyone had a great Halloween! It turns out Samhain and related Fall festivals are very ancient observances in human history and prehistory, long predating when All Hallows Eve was co-opted by Catholicism as All Saint’s Day, and probably date back to the Neolithic. Some Neolithic Dolmens are oriented to the sunrise at the times of Samhain and Imbolc (the rite of Spring), and the Scottish Anthropologist Sir James Frazier, the author of The Golden Bough, speculates these were the most important holy days for transhumance or pasturing cultures, more even than midsummer or midwinter, as they helped regulate food supply. The stones at Dumha na nGiall or Mound of the Hostages and Slieve na Calliagh The Calliach’s Mountain in County Meath, Ireland, are so oriented, and so is a Neolithic Henge in Avebury, Southwest England, which is actually bigger in diameter than Stonehenge, but with smaller stones. It dates to 3,000 BC, similar to Stonehenge, with human occupation going back much earlier, 4,000-7,000 BC and the site as a whole, all the way back to the Paleolithic (10,000 BC+).
The ancient Egyptians also had the festival Koiak in autumn, honoring the god Osiris and symbolizing the resurrection of the crops (after being harvested) and the god (Osiris was resurrected by Isis after being killed by Set). And the ancient Sumerians had the Fall Mourning festival of Dumuzid, marking the end of the agricultural year, when he would die and spend half the year in the Underworld with Erishkagal. He would be resurrected by Ishtar, the Moon Goddess, and would then spend half the year with her in heaven, bringing rains. These southern ancient cultures also date back at least 10,000 yrs. or more into prehistory, so it’s truly a Paleolithic observance of our species, both for agriculture and pasturing, to open these gateways to the Underworld in the Fall. In ancient Egypt and Babylon it would have marked the beginning of rainy season-winter in the desert, and flooding of the rivers which was critical for cultivation. So it was a key observance for practical survival, and it makes sense the ancients, both north and south, would have seen it as a doorway of life and death.
Interestingly, some details of these ancient rites made it into the Bible. It’s natural there would have been widespread syncretism among the old Near-Eastern civilizations. Some scholars believe the resurrected Osiris was a precursor for Christ. And in the Old Testament, there are many mentions of Dumuzid (named Tammuz) and his consort Inanna or Ishtar: e.g. Song of Solomon 6:10 "Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?" This is almost certainly a reference to Inanna-Ishtar.
Hope you enjoyed your candy and your costumes, but take a second to salute Làn-Ghealach (the full Moon) and any Mion-Ghealacha (mini-Moons), and respect those ancestors and ancient Gods! Give a thought to Dumuzid of the green sheaves, his consort the Goddess Ishtar, and if you want to Walk Like an Egyptian, hail Isis, also a Moon Goddess of Magic and Resurrection! 🌕🏺👁️🗨️
