Space Travel: Video of Harvest Moon, Stellar Events

Space Travel: Video of Harvest Moon, Stellar Events

Published 09/26/2010

(Portland, Oregon) – The universe seemed just a tad smaller this week, as Jupiter got closer than ever to the Earth, a distinctive full moon made a splash all around the world, and a few other earthly and semi-earthly events will take place.

Portland – indeed the rest of the world – was abuzz this week with the massive display of the Super Harvest Moon. But in Portland it meant more than it usually would because we had stellar, nearly cloudless conditions to witness it. This also coincided with the planet Jupiter being closest to the Earth than it had in decades, since 1963.

OregonTravelDaily.com managed to get some decent shots of this wondrous phenomenon from southwest Portland, along with some intriguing video. Granted, the video is hazier than the still shots, and it is rather minimalist (as in “nothing appears to be happening other than a big full moon”). But there’s a little more than meets the eye here. Clouds periodically skirt across this massive moon, giving it a lovely Halloween vibe, but most of all it’s rather interesting to watch this orb slowly inch its way up the frame. There’s only about a minute of footage here, so it’s amazing to see how quickly the moon actually scoots along the sky – how far it’s gone by the end of the video clip. Funny how you don’t even realize it as it's happening.

The other interesting aspect to this is that Jupiter, at its brightest in a long, long time, appears to follow the moon throughout the sky in the last few days. It’s always somewhere near the familiar white circle, and never seems to stray very far.

Reports have been coming in from around the world that you can actually see some of Jupiter’s moons with binoculars.

You’ll see more of Jupiter throughout October, while our “evening star” – Venus – disappears beyond the horizon. For a time, however, there will be “dueling planets” in the night sky, as Jupiter and Venus are still in the great black expanse together until October 10, around 6:45 p.m. Venus will be low in the west while Jupiter will rise from the east.

Meanwhile, Mars will be lurking just above Venus in the first half of October while it’s still around, and then it will stay low in the western sky around dusk for the rest of the month.

The sad news for you fans of daylight here in the northwest part of the United States is that now we have crossed that borderline for sunlight vs. dark hours in the season, and the days now have more dark than sunlight. Hooray for the vampire set, however.

In other space news, Saturday, a Minotaur IV rocket blasted off from California to deploy a military space surveillance into orbit. Apparently you could see it from hundreds of miles around Vandenberg Air Force Base.

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