Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

This is Ephemeris for Tuesday, May 6th. Today the Sun will be up for 14 hours and 28 minutes, setting at 8:54, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:23. The Moon, 2 days past first quarter, will set at 4:20 tomorrow morning.

With the Artemis moon program in doubt, NASA’s budget being cut, and scientific programs being eliminated, I’m going to wait until the dust settles a bit before I talk more about it. In the meantime I’d like to digress a bit with a little bit of expertise I’ve gotten from my working life as a systems engineer and computer programmer. I have no expertise in what’s hot now in computers, which is artificial intelligence or AI, but I do have some thoughts about it which I will talk about later on this week and next while the constellations are pretty much wiped out by the Moon’s bright light. AI came upon the scene rather suddenly*, after years of quiet development. All of a sudden just about every smartphone and computer app seems to have an AI component.

The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EDT, UT – 4 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.

*I’m a bit old, and moving slowly, but the clock seems to tick faster. Just about anything seems to happen faster.