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Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Fuller than thou...

It is a little known fact that the moon over Beautiful South Lake Union is actually twice as full* as when observed from all other places in the universe (see scientific data: Calculating volume changes in a swollen... surface... by R. Lennihan - 1973 and Algorithm for Rapid Calculation of Excluded Volume of Large... by N.G. Jun'lchi Higo - 1989 * hence twice as looney, romantic, etc. Chuck Pefley well-illustrates this phenomenon, below, with only a half-moon, for obvious safety reasons:
One A Day - Mostly Seattle

Half-Full

The half-moon mesmerized me as I scooted home from a meeting last night. It looked almost close enough to touch as it hung before me in the night sky. Of course it isn't, but as this photo was made using a 900 mm lens it looks pretty close. The average distance from Earth to Moon, by the way, is 238,857 miles, though the actual distance varies over the course of the orbit of the moon. Here is a short Wiki article that talks about Lunar Distance.

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