Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Monday, August 8th.  The sun rises at 6:36.  It’ll be up for 14 hours and 22 minutes, setting at 8:58.   The moon, 2 days past first quarter, will set at 2:17 tomorrow morning.

With the announcement last week that the earth may have had two moons, we’d kind of look at our surviving moon in a new light.  Tonight the terminator, the line between light and dark on the moon, really the sunrise line crosses through the Sea of Clouds or Mare Imbrium.  Telescope will reveal the crater Copernicus near the moon’s equator that will come into sunlight an hour from now as you listen to this.  Two astronomers from the US and Switzerland propose that the collision of the earth that created the moon also created another moon.  After a time this second, smaller moon crashed into our moon and created the dark seas on the side that faces the earth.  The far side of the moon only has one small sea, the Sea of Moscow, discovered by the Russians in 1959 with their Lunik 3 spacecraft.

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