Monthly Archives: June 2005

From Science@NASA:

bq.. The lowest-hanging full moon in 18 years is going to play tricks on you this week.

Sometimes you can’t believe your eyes. This week is one of those times.

Step outside any evening at sunset and look around. You’ll see a giant moon rising in the east. It looks like Earth’s moon, round and cratered; the Man in the Moon is in his usual place. But something’s wrong. This full moon is strangely inflated. It’s huge!

You’ve just experienced the Moon Illusion.

Sky watchers have known this for thousands of years: moons hanging low in the sky look unnaturally big. Cameras don’t see it, but our eyes do. It’s a real illusion.

This week’s full moon hangs lower in the sky than any full moon since June 1987, so the Moon Illusion is going to be extra strong.

What makes the moon so low? It’s summer. Remember, the sun and the full Moon are on opposite sides of the sky. During summer the sun is high, which means the full moon must be low. This week?s full moon occurs on June 22nd, barely a day after the summer solstice on June 21st–perfect timing for the Moon Illusion.

When you look at the moon, rays of moonlight converge and form an image about 0.15 mm wide in the back of your eye. High moons and low moons make the same sized spot. So why does your brain think one is bigger than the other? After all these years, scientists still aren’t sure why.

Maybe it’s the shape of the sky. Humans perceive the sky as a flattened dome, with the zenith nearby and the horizon far away. It makes sense: Birds flying overhead are closer than birds on the horizon. When the moon is near the horizon, your brain, trained by watching birds, miscalculates the moon’s true distance and size.

The best time to look is around moonrise, when the moon is peeking through trees and houses or over mountain ridges, doing its best to trick you.

p. Note that the best time to see this illusion in the North East is 7:25 PM on June 20, 8:39 PM on June 21 and 9:43 PM on June 22.

From Yahoo:

bq.. Producers had always indicated that the movie would likely debut after the TV show ran its course. But with the show continuing to perform well, averaging about 10 million viewers last season, the Simpsons brain trust decided to move forward now, according to a rep for 20th Century Fox, which will distribute the Simpsons film.

“They are working on hammering out a script, but there’s no title or production date or release date,” studio spokeswoman Antonia Coffman told E! Online Wednesday. “We always wanted the show to end first but it just keeps going. Now they’ve worked out a team to simultaneously do [both the film and show].”

From SiliconValleyWatcher:

bq.. Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San Francisco, and eventually other major US cities.

The trucks would drive along every San Francisco street using the lasers to measure the dimensions of buildings, to create a 3D framework onto which digital photos can be mapped. This would complement the mostly top-down view of San Francisco available through Google’s Keyhole satellite photo application.

The goal is to create similar 3D online versions of other cities in the US and overseas.

Some good pointers on how to choose a digital camera, via the Digital Photography Blog.

I wish I could have seen one of these critters.

bq.. Analyses of ancient fossils suggest that early Australian Aborigines did not wipe out the continent’s megafauna in a frenzied hunting rampage. New research conducted by Australian and British scientists reveals that in fact humans and megafauna, such as gigantic three tonne wombat-like creatures, a ferocious marsupial “lion” and the world’s all-time biggest lizard, may have co-existed for around 15 000 years.

In a study published in the prestigious scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, a research team including co-authors Dr Judith Field of the University of Sydney and Dr Clive Trueman of the University of Portsmouth establish that some Australian megafauna, including the largest animals, persisted until around 30,000 years ago, coexisting with humans for at least 15,000 years.

p. Full article is available here.

!-/IMAGES/megawombat.jpg (Megawombat vs Bert Convy)!

Image 1: Megawombat compared to Bert Convy