Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

This post was made late due to some WordPress posting issues last night.

This is Ephemeris for Tuesday, April 7th. Today the Sun will be up for 13 hours and 5 minutes, setting at 8:18, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:10. The Moon, 3 days before last quarter, will rise at 2:33 tomorrow morning.

Yesterday evening the Artemis 2 crew flew over the far side of the moon. The moon to us has a waning gibbous phase. The far side is actually a waxing crescent, so most of the far side was in night. They might have gotten a good look at Mare Orientale, which is right on the edge of the moon that we see from Earth. It is a double-walled sea that looks like a bulls eye. Now they’re on their way back to the earth and will splash down in the Pacific Ocean later this week. Unlike Apollo 8 which orbited the moon, they will not be flying over any proposed landing sites. They flew over the moon’s equator while Artemis 4 will attempt to land near the moon’s South Pole. Besides, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has surveyed it much better than they could have.

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; EST, UT – 5 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.

Addendum

The script for the program seen above was written and recorded Sunday night April 5th before Artemis 2’s lunar flyby. This comment is made after the flyby on the late afternoon of April 6th. I speculated about Mare Orientale being something I wanted to have them investigate. And they did spend a great deal of time observing it, so we should expect some very nice photographs of it when they’re sent back. The image above is from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter taken several years ago, at least. I find it a really cool feature.