Loomin Moon, and Doom not Looming?

Today is Good Friday, and tomorrow comes the full Moon that is just in time to make the next day Easter Sunday.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

We show the Moon rising in the east, on this and several surrounding evenings, as the Sun goes down in the west. At full phase, the Moon will be passing Spica, the bright star of Virgo, and both are close to the “anti-Sun.”

As we mentioned a few days ago and showed in a graph, the rule is that Easter is the Sunday after the full Moon that is on or after March 21. This is one of the years when Easter comes late, because the previous full Moon was as late as March 18. It’s also one of the years when the actual spring equinox occurs not on March 21, the date assumed by the ecclesiastical rule, but on March 20.

Here was the nearly-full Moon rising over the Thames on Thursday.

Down to Earth Department

The latest news about climate crisis sounds good: the first full study pf the pledges made by countries to reduce their emission of greenhouse gas shows that it will be possible to keep global heating to less than the catastrophic 2 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, in fact to 1.9°.

That is greeted as grounds for optimism. But we have to consider. It will happen if all 195 countries implement their pledges almost immediately, and in full. And hardly any of them are doing so. And the safe level is not 1.9 degrees, it is 1.5.

We still need pressure and protest and grassroots movements. Recently, a Conservative politician, Ben Goldsmith, was forced to apologize for saying “I’m with Extinction Rebellion,” because its form of protest is to block traffic on highways, which hampers people from getting to work. Maybe there are better means of protest. But, in the longer view, which is more essential – getting to work, or surviving?

There is some real good news: vertical farming is spreading rapidly.

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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” or “Open image in new tabV, 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.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.  Or you can click ‘Refresh’ to get the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.