Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Ephemeris for Monday, May 5th.  The sun rises at 6:27.  It’ll be up for 14 hours and 24 minutes, setting at 8:52.   The moon, 1 day before first quarter, will set at 2:09 tomorrow morning.

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer  or LADEE spacecraft that was in a close orbit of the moon to sniff out the Moon’s tenuous exosphere of gases and dust, augured into the moon’s far side April 17th as planned.  This was just the end of the data acquisition phase of the mission.  The data will be pored over for years to develop a picture of the lunar environment.  This will aid lunar explorers to come both robotic and human.  Something similar is happening to the Kepler mission to find transiting planets of other stars.  The data gathering phase is over but there was an announcement a week or such ago of an earth sized planet in a stars habitable zone.  Discoveries will go on for years.

Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Artist’s depiction of LADEE in orbit of the Moon. Courtesy NASA.

More about the LADEE Mission is here.