9/22/2005: Red flash moon
 

http://cellar.org/2005/redflashmoon.jpg

Katkeeper points out that the IotD has featured a green flash on the sun before so why not today's ApoD, which is a red flash on the moon? OK.

You can see more green color at the top and more red at the bottom, too. ApoD explains: While the long sight-line through the atmosphere filters and reddens the moonlight, it also bends different colors of light through slightly different angles, producing noticeable red (bottom) and green (top) lunar rims. Also captured here floating just below the Moon is a thin, red mirage (inset) -- in this case, an atmospherically magnified and distorted image of the red rim.

That's cool.

Not that I need another photographic holy grail to seek, after striving to capture a green flash at sunset. I never did catch one myself, but I thoroughly enjoyed the quest. Nice picture. Thanks, UT.

I'd heard of the harvest moon and the hunters moon but never heard of a Goatse moon. :eek:

Very cool.

:biggrin: TW will be along to explain why that's all BS

How much light passes through the earth's atmosphere and illuminates the moon has been an ongoing experiment for some decades now. Research has suggested a substancial decrease in light absorbing materials in earths atmosphere. If air is dirtier, then global warming has occurred slower.

Also part of this experiment is measuring light intensity of the sun. It too varies. Numerous variable. Equipment that must remain calibrated for minor variations of light intensity over generations. Complex study.

Must be my turn in the box...

Hey, tw. The moon is illuminated by the sun, not by the earth. The clarity of the atmoshphere affects the visibility of the moon from earth of course.

I have read nothing that suggests the conclusion that dirtier air is evidence of slowed global warming.

I did not need that thought ...

You're all wrong!!!! Everyone knows the moon is made of red cheese.


Jeeze!

Mmmmm... Gouda!

I did not know what Goatse was. Thanks to Google, and xoxoxobruce, now, I do.

I learn something new every damn day.

I'm sorry you had to find out what Goatse is. You didn't actually see him, did you?

Oh my god. I didn't know what Goatse was either. I just went and looked it up.

I cannot unsee what I saw.

We've all had that exact same wish.

And somehow, the power of the image is such that every time from here on out that someone so much as mentions it, you'll vomit in your throat a little bit. Every single time.

I feel your pain.

(N.B. the upside is that while the image swims to the fore of your consciousness when you see the name, it does not remain in the front of your head all the time. It doesn't stick there, like the Barney Song or The Chicken Dance Tune. Repression is a protective mechanism for the brain. The human brain is a miraculous machine. This proves it.)

Such is the power of Goatse. It's actually quite amazing. You say things like, "I'm sorry you saw Goatse." other people say things like "I wish I could go back in time and not see Goatse." The message couldn't be more plain. YOU WILL BE SORRY IF YOU LOOK AT GOATSE.

And yet others will come, read those comments, be curious, and actively seek out Goatse. Goatse is a power that can't be stopped. Almost like a black hole. Once you have heard the mention of Goatse, you have crossed the event horizon, and nothing you can do will keep you from being sucked in. :eek:

wikipedia is a good source of info if you don't want to just look at the thing

No..... Not really.

It was more red than black...

Well, thank you for the wikipedia referance. I too had never heard of this, and thankfully will refrain from actualy seeing the image after reading the wikipedia background. I must assume that the picture isn't photoshopeed.

O. M. G.

You looked, didn't you. Everybody looks. It's like the tickle on the back of your neck that won't go away, but you can't find the spider that you're sure is causing it. You keep at it and at it and at it ...

"Don't look, Marion!!"

I would like to suggest that nobody looks up "tubgirl" either. Worse than goatse.

I didn't realize that had a name.

Too late.

God I hate being a curious person sometimes.

My bad.....I figured anybody thats been on the net more than a couple months would have run across Goatse at some point. Didn't realize there were so many innocents abroad. :o

But, but, but.....I didn't post a link.

In this case, I will believe what I see on the internet and preserve my goatse-tubgirl virginity. Thanks guys.

I think tw is talking about illumination of the moon when it is in earths penumbra or during an eclipse when some to all of the light hitting the moon has been filtered thru the earth's atmosphere.

Correct. The moon would be completely dark. But sunlight passing through the earth's atmosphere is refracted. Lowest frequency light is bent most which is why the moon glows red. Intensity of that light measures atmosphere clarity. This intensity must be compensated for by adjustments in the moon's orbit (apogee and perigee, etc), variation in sun's intensity, how the light is measured, etc. These experiments have been ongoing for decades. I thought I had posted a description previously in The Cellar. Apparently not.

We've discussed it before.....also Earth's gravity bending light slightly.....but it was probably a while ago. May not have been in IOtD either. :)

Correct.
Not so. Although the redder frequencies of the visible portion of the spectrum of light are refracted more than the bluer frequencies, this has nothing to do with the percieved color of the moon in this example. The red of the moon and the blue of the sky are what they are for the same reason: scattering. The gasses that compose our atmosphere scatter light at different rates, and blue light is scattered about four times more than red light. Consequently, of all the light that manages to reach the observer standing on the surface of the earth, much more of the blue has been removed leaving a greater proportion of red, hence the reddish moon.

The "intensity of that light measures atmospheric clarity" but it is an extremely coarse measurement indeed, having precisely five stops on the scale. And while it is influenced by the current atmospheric conditions, including cloud cover, its intended purpose is to describe the brightness of the moon during and eclipse, not atmospheric clarity.

From the earlier post...
This sounds like nonsense. Do you care to explain it in more detail? :eyebrow:

no, actually, i didn't and after reading the description, i won't. but the visual i have leads me to think that right before he "posed" he said "HEY Y'ALL! WATCH THIS!"

Edit: damn you Wolf! :vomit:

Tell me where all this red 'scattered' light is at midnight? The moon is red because that is the red light refracted through the earth's atmosphere - the only source of light to illuminate the moon. Blue light does not bend sufficiently AND therefore does not illuminate the moon. The amount of red light that illuminates the moon is the amount of red light refracted through the earth's atmosphere.

My odometer is only good to a mile. So how do I measure the distance between two points to within a hundreth of a mile? It's called statistics. Take enough data to obtain an accurate reading. Other variables to this experiment are included when taking that data; only some I have listed. But these variables are taken into account when measurements over generations showed a decrease in the amount of light reaching the moon - through earth's atmosphere.

Your assumptions about clouds and crude measuring assume no knowledge of statistics and no use of instruments. These experiements (and others including a measurment of sun's intensity) have been ongoing for decades using calibrated instruments; meaning these 'course measurements' by science have resulted in accurate data.

Meanwhile the course measurements that Big V cited from Danjon Scale of Lunar Eclipse Brightness are how the laymen - without instruments - can ball park the same experiment. That citation also says BigV's own citation confirms that lunar eclipses measure the clarity of earth's atmosphere. The accusation of "This sounds like nonsense. Do you care to explain it in more detail?" is posted in direct contradiction to BigV's own citation. Care to explain why you did not read your own citation before posting?

I thank you for confirming what I had posted. The illumination of the moon by light refracted in earth's atmosphere is one method to measure clarity or contamination of earth's atmosphere. Big V confirms how the experiment is performed- and how laymen without instruments can do the same experiment.

Hey, tw, before I have to reach in to my big bag o' insults, I'd like to draw your attention to this particular question, and correct your misunderstanding. For now, I'll let your incorrect assumptions about what I read slide.

In your first post in this thread, which I quoted twice now, you made this statement:
This is the statement that I find nonsensical. I you can explain it, I'd like to hear it. If you can't, or won't, and I don't think you can, then I'll just consider the source and drop it.

One point at a time...

At midnight, tw, all the light, red, blue, and otherwise, is on the opposite side of the planet. Shining on the planet. Shining on the atmosphere. Shining through the atmosphere. For those folks actually on the opposite side of the planet, where it would be midday, absent cloud cover, they would see this light, and the sky would be blue. It looks blue because the blue light of the visible spectrum of light scatters the most, "filling the sky" with that lovely blue color. You're seeing the atmosphere.

Those folks about six hours away in either direction see a rosy sunrise or a rosy sunset, weather conditions permitting. You yourself, and every other non blind or color blind person reading this post has had considerable first hand empirical evidence of this. Pay attention. Because the people near the terminator, the line between light and dark, have to see the sun or moon through so much more atmosphere, so much more blue light is scattered, and the proportion of light that does still get through without having been scattered is much higher in the redder frequencies. Roughly speaking, sunlight minus blue equals red.

Now, let's continue on to midnight. As an observer on the surface of the earth, the sunlight you're able to see at midnight would have to be reflected off of something. This is because the sunlight IS refracted. ALL sunlight. The variation, of how much more or less a given frequency of light is refracted is called dispersion. It only amounts to about 1% across the visible spectrum, and for our purposes, is irrelevant. From here:
So ALL light is refracted (including the blue frequencies) through the earth's atmosphere. A quick review of what refraction is:
Emphasis mine. Refraction happens at the boundary between space and atmosphere and again at the atmosphere space boundary on it's way back out of the atmosphere. Incidentally, it is refracted again as it reflects off the moon and into your eye, refracted again at the air/cornea boundary. Finally it is absorbed by the rods and cones on your retina. But I digress.

As the sunlight passes through and is refracted at the space/air boundary, it only CHANGES DIRECTION, NOT FREQUENCY. What goes in red comes out red, what goes in blue comes out blue. But there's the rub. The blue doesn't come out in our lunar eclipse model, it's scattered much much more by the ]dramatically longer slog through our atmosphere than the red is on its way from the sun, through the limb (second definition) of the earth, to the moon and back.

That, tw, is why the moon appears red during an eclipse. The blue frequencies are scattered more than the red frequencies. You only see what gets to your eyes. Or maybe you don't. But not through any fault of mine.

Yeah, like this instrument measures weather.

Hey, my pleasure. Anything I can do to bolster your credibility is a blow to the evil MBAs of the world, and to our mutual benfit.

I think a better wording of tw's statement would be: "Our atmosphere is getting cleaner, according to research. Since dirt particles in the air absorb light, less light is being absorbed, leaving more of it to fall upon the Earth. More light equals more heat, and more heat is sorta similar to the idea of global warming. Therefore, if we had left the dirt in the air, the planet would be warming more slowly than it is now that we're pulling all of this debris out of our atmosphere. This is ironic, because 'clean the air' and 'stop global warming' are two major goals of the environmentalists, and they are seemingly at odds. Ha, ha!"

As to the veracity of his statement, I have no fucking clue. Sounds pretty damn fishy to me. But I'm just the translator here.

How much red light illuminates the moon? Depends on clarity of earth's atmosphere. "Our atmosphere is getting dirtier , according to research. Since dirt particles in the air absorb light, less light falls upon the Earth. Therefore, if we leave dirt in the air, the planet would be warming quickly as it is currently warming ." IOW global warming problem may be more serious than earlier thought. A problem masked by a dirtier atmosphere. Even with less sunlight, global warming continues.

Is more dirty air a good thing? Less light means less crops and less conversion of CO2 into O2. The short term benefits of a dirty atmosphere could have long term negative consequences for agriculture and result in more global warming gases in the long term.

You guys are all pretty smart. I never, never, never think about this stuff (I know--leaving myself wide open for an insult-fest) but, seriously, I never do. Why do you all worry about this? Just enjoy the red moon. Maybe it's a sign of the endtimes or something. ;)

What, goatse and tubgirl?

whatevah.
Light that is absorbed contributes to the net energy gain, if it's absorbed, it's warmer. Take a couple of sheets of paper, one black, one white. Lay them out in the sun for several minutes. Check the temperature of each sheet. Which one is warmer? The black one, because it ABSORBED more light, while the white one reflected more light.

Dirt in the air is a vanishingly small fraction of the light/heat absorbing components in our atmosphere. The largest contributor to absorbtion of light energy? Water vapor, followed by carbon dioxide and on down the line from there.
This is the nonsense I spoke of. Are you talking about something you learned somewhere else? Or are you making it up? Or are you just trying to stir the sh*t? Cause, on it's face, this is crap. Your "conclusions" do not follow from your assumptions. For that matter, your assumptions are mostly crap too. "...there is less sunlight... ...less light falls on the earth..."

You're out of your area of expertise, tw, and it shows. This kind of behavior reminds me of the misguided people who are clamoring for ID to be considered on par with evolution, "cause, it's just a theory, you don't really know. Nyah." Puh-lease.

A buddy of mine and I are sitting around after a game one early morning and the topic came around to how the full moon looked especially bright that night:

Mitheral: Man the moon sure is bright tonight.
Friend of Mitheral: Did you know that the moon is 1 millionth the brightness of the sun?
M: Say what?
FoM: Ya, I read that a clear sky full moon reflects about 1/1,000,000 of the suns light to the surface of the earth.
M: Not that I don't believe you, what with you being the rocket scientist and all<1>, but let's take Bill Nye's advice to heart<2> and give this a test.

So the next night we head out to a sufficiently dark place away from the light pollution of town with 35mm gear and a stopwatch. A few quick calculations of F-stops and reciprocity failure time fudges and we start taking _long_ exposures of the surrounding scenery.

Five days later (we're not working for the government here so we didn't see any need to pay for 1hr processing) we had a half dozen pictures of what appeared at first glance to be fairly normal looking landscapes.

Until you noticed that the grass was all fuzzy soft looking like a new piece of fleece but fence posts and buildings were razor sharp. There wasn't even much of a colour cast as the moon is a pretty near perfect grey card. The ever so slightly off colours were probably a result of the 4+ minute exposure times. Kind of a '70s techincolour effect.

So yes the light reflected by the moon to earth is about 1 millionth the brightness of the sun.

<1> Sort of, though more a rocket scientist in training, he was an aerospace engineering student.

<2> One test is worth a thousand expert opinions.

I believe tw is talking about
Global Dimming which is the observed fact that the brightness of the sun at ground level declined about 5% between the 1950 and 1990. This dimming it's postulated was caused by particulate pollution which has been reduced due to measures like the Clean Air Act in the USA. Of concern is this dimming may have kept the earth cooler that it would otherwise have been during those decades meaning models predicting the effects of green house gasses on global warming may be underestimating their effect. As we continue to reduce particulate emmisions the sun should continue to brighten.

See also the BBC

On the upside this means that solar panels should get more effective.

This isn't intelligent design, just some people publishing an observed effect and others trying to use this knowledge to explain problems in global warming models.

When America used to make things and the coal fired smokestacks were belching great plumes of soot, the weather was definitely cooler on the ground. The soot may have been absorbing the heat from the sun and dissipating it around the world for a net increase in total heat, but locally it was cooler. :)

red moon
 

Maybe that red phenomenon is the spaceship that the Scientologists say is waiting on the other side of the moon to take us all away to Paradise?

ok, who let the Canadian in?!

Global warning was recently connected with activity of man. That part is no longer disputable. However details of the mechanism(s) involved are still being learned. Another piece of the puzzle has been identified: From BBC News of 12 Nov 2005:

Huh? The radiation given off by the Earth goes up and then falls back to Earth? Gravity pull? Reflected off the Troposphere?

Anyway, everyone knows it's not the heat....it's the humidity. :blush:

I didn't look either, yay!
Maybe I'm growing up.....

Or maybe I have seen enough arseholes today - either works for me.

You all are going to think I have Goatse on the brain, especially after Wolf put one of my posts in the hall of fame thread.

Anyway, I just discovered (through Boing Boing) a flickr group of images of people's reactions after seeing goatse for the first time. It's very funny. Check the flickr group out. Hell, you can even join in. Surprise friends, and submit your own pictures to flickr.
Here's a funny one: