On this unlucky Friday December 13, the Moon is at its northernmost point for the year.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
The northernmost moment is 21 Universal Time, which is 4, 3, 2, and 1 PM by clocks in North America’s Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific zones.
The declination of that point is 23.23°, which is not as far north as the ecliptic arches. As you may can see, the Moon has failed to cross the ecliptic soon enough: the marked “solstice point” is the ecliptic’s northernmost, being where the Sun is at midsummer; the Moon’s ascending node across the ecliptic was at Dec. 13 14 UT. This is a yea(r when the Moon’s ever-changing orbit is slewed so that it doesn’t reach extremely high north or south. Similarly on Dec. 26 the Moon will come to its southernmot point for the year, only 23.23° south.)
It also happens that the Moon is only just past its Full moment (Dec. 12 about 5 UT), when it met the “anti-Sun.”. And it is parading through the constellation of Gemini. So this is rather a nuisance of a Moon for those meteors that you can also see schematically bursting into the picture. Nevertheless the great annual Geminid shower should be strong enough to shine at least partly through moonlight, and we’ll describe it in the next post that should follow shortly.
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Home planet department
A thoroughly bad man has been confirmed as boss of Britain – a tool of the billionaires, who control the large-circulation newspapers. I leave it to a forceful pre-election summary by John McDonnell (the good man we should have as chancellor) of the probable consequences for inequality, poverty, homelessness, public services, and the environment.
While Britain continues to shrink as a nation and shrink away from Europe, Europe continues to lead the struggle toward a better world.
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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
It’s interesting that Boris Johnson disapproves of the EU but is against Scottish independence as the UK is a miniature EU everything he said that the EU wants to be a union of states with central control in Brussels or in the UK London.he is right in a way as the EU for example has mandated that police cars within the EU are painting in silver blue liveries I’m guessing because they believe that it makes public identification of the police vehicles easier or closer integration of states by stealth or both?but the election of right wing authoritarian leaders is happening across the world look at the present rioting in India caused directly by modi wanting to exclude Muslim refugees to India arriving from next door countries his argument is on the surface sound:that Muslims are not under threat in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Bangladesh but obviously that’s assuming that there’s one type of Muslim and like Christianity there’s a host of branches and from my reading Shia, Ishmaeli and other non Sunni Muslims are not exactly popular in the first 2 countries.bangladesh is a bit different as like India is ment to be a secular nation and is a close friend of Indias.
But the vote is Scotland went well .which leads me to muse if English political parties should be allowed to stand in Scotland after all Scottish (nor northern Irish) political parties don’t run in England .of course by styling themselves as British they feel that they can stand in any country of the UK by this rule they should field candidates in northern Ireland?these British nationalists had a good laugh when Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the USSR fell apart “not a natural union of peoples old boy”they chortled so why should the UK be any different?on the sinking island front this may be so as Scotland and Ireland rise up slowly ,not politically but geologically, due to the weight of the ice of the long melted ice age southern England will go down although global sea rises may get there first!?
Home planet: John McDonnell’s campaign speech is compelling, and the EU green deal is a huge practical step in the right direction.
I was listening to the BBC World Service yesterday evening here in the Pacific time zone. The pundits were trying to explain how the Labour Party lost so many seats that they have held for decades, and how the Conservative Party won such a decisive parliamentary majority when the voters are still split nearly 50-50 on Brexit. From my outside perspective, this seems like another bad consequence of a winner-take-all political system. I don’t have any workable suggestions, but I wish we could move toward a more collaborative, consensus-based way of running our governments. And given the Scottish National Party’s big gains, it seems likely that they will agitate for another Scottish independence referendum. And the Northern Irish unionists are between a rock and a hard place. In a few years (not so) Great Britain might be the United Kingdom of England and Wales.
Home planet plus satellite plus star: The Astronomical Calendar and Astronomical Companion taught me how the Moon’s nodes precess relative to the ecliptic, resulting in an 18-year cycle of “ecliptic-like”, “hilly”, “ecliptic-like”, and “flat” Moon years (I might not be using exactly the same terminology you used). With the Moon crossing the ecliptic close to the Sun’s solstice points, 2019 has been an ecliptic-like year. Now we’re headed toward a few flat years, right?
Consensus-based – yes, that would be a kindlier politics than any election-based. It’s hard to see how it could work in any society larger than a village, but perhaps it will evolve.
I wonder whether the Approval Voting that I advocate tends toward consensus. It would produce results tolerable for more people.
Consensus isn’t good in all circumstances. I remember a session in an Amnesty conference where some were indignant that a motion was passed by what the chairperson thought was consensus – a large show of hands – instead of by a vote that might have reflected the feelings of the opposition.
The winner-takes-all electoral system has been ideal for making the Brexit issue into a source of divisiveness.
Here in San Francisco we have ranked choice voting for local offices. This has resulted in a board of supervisors (our local legislative body) that is *both* more progressive *and* more pragmatic and collaborative, as well as a newly elected district attorney, Chesa Boudin, (the chief prosecutor of criminal cases) who is remarkably progressive.
A few years ago California replaced party primary elections with open primaries. Previously each political party elected their preferred candidate, and then the candidates of each party competed in the general election. Now the top two candidates from the primary, regardless of party, compete in the general election. In a given district, you might have a Democrat and a Republican in the general election, two Democrats, or two Republicans, depending on the political culture of that district. Statewide races often have two Democratic candidates. Party primaries tended to produce candidates who were more ideologically extreme, while the open primary has produced candidates who are more centrist. We also took legislative redistricting out of the hands of the legislature and created a non-partisan citizen commission to redraw legislative district lines, so that district boundaries are more closely aligned with local demographics, rather than being drawn to ensure the reelection of incumbents in the current majority party. The state government is getting more done, e.g. on climate change.
I guess the general point is that procedural changes to how elections are run can produce practical results in better governance. In many other states and at the federal level, voter suppression, gerrymandered legislative districts, and the Electoral College are resulting in minority rule by right-wing Republicans. The way elections are organized can also have negative effects.
I have been a leftist my whole life (I remember that my parents voted Liberal instead of Democrat when they also listed Roosevelt for president in 1944),and have voted accordingly in the US and eventually Canada–but not when the Left’s candidate was an anti-Semite. Were I British, I could not vote for a party led by Jeremy Corbyn. As a Jew, I would feel I was cutting my own throat. Is Boris Johnson any better? Of course not. What a ghastly choice you have given yourselves.
Well said. We share your grief. As we speak, he’s been congratulated by his murderous and corrupt peers: T., Duterte, Modi, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Prince Salman, etc etc (and I wish we could refer to the whole lot of them just as ‘etc’). How come we wound up having only Angela Merkel (who’s rumored to have Parkinson’s) as defender of the free world? She wasn’t born for that part, but in this scarcity, she’s been actually commendable. Cheers