Miscellaneous Pi Day Musings

Pi day

So it's pi day - only in countries that use the same month first, day second like the USA - 3/14.  Which we'll write as 3.14 just once a year.

According to Wikipedia, it's the US, Philippines, Federated States of Micronesia and Marshall Islands.  The last two were US territories until the 1980s while the Philippines became independent from the US in 1946 after WWII. The rest of the world will never have a pi day.

In addition to being pi day, it's also Albert Einstein's birthday and the day that Steven Hawking shuffled off this mortal coil. I think nobody in the current generation of scientists has been compared to Einstein as much as Hawking was.  It's interesting they have the same day as major bookmarks in their lives.  One checking in, one checking out.

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

About last night's lunar eclipse

Lunar eclipses aren't very rare.  A particular eclipse isn't necessarily visible every where but wherever you live, in the area that's exposed to it, you'll pretty much see the same thing.  Unlike the solar eclipses where if you're not within a handful of miles of the centerline of its path, you'll see something very different than if you're right on the centerline.  

Last night, though was a very rare eclipse because Firefly's Blue Ghost lander was able to photograph it from the moon and beam the photo back down.  

Sky watchers in the Americas had a beautiful view of the 90 minute event. For a small number of astronomers, however, the real action happened a quarter million miles away in Mare Crisium, where Blue Ghost watched the eclipse from the other direction. Eric Allen of Quebec, Canada, created this composite of both views:

Just to be clear, Blue Ghost is in that roundish dark area next to the right edge of the visible side of the moon, just above the midline.  From the moon, Blue Ghost was photographing the sun passing in front of the sun.  In other words, Blue Ghost was looking at us looking at the moon.  Image credit to Eric Allen, posted at SpaceWeather.com

I was mildly surprised to see  SpaceWeather.com say that this wasn't the first time that a lunar lander watched and photographed a lunar eclipse from the moon.  On April 24, 1967, a television camera on NASA's Surveyor III took a picture of the Earth blocking out the sun over Oceanus Procellarum.  The picture is lower resolution and less interesting looking than the one above. 

The Crew-10 flight is on the way

We were able to watch SpaceX's crew dragon launch tonight, carrying Crew-10 to the ISS and starting the mission to return Crew-9 with Butch and Suni.  Launch was at 7:03PM EDT.  The Dragon is expected to dock autonomously to the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module at approximately 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 15. Shortly after docking, the crew will join Expedition 72/73 for a long-duration stay aboard the orbiting laboratory. 

NASA’s live coverage resumes at 9:45 p.m., March 15, on NASA+ with rendezvous, docking, and hatching opening. After docking, the crew will change out of their spacesuits and prepare cargo for offload before opening the hatch between Dragon and the space station’s Harmony module around 1:05 a.m., Sunday, March 16. Once the new crew is aboard the orbital outpost, NASA will broadcast welcome remarks from Crew-10 and farewell remarks from the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 crew, beginning at about 1:40 a.m.

...

The number of crew aboard the space station will increase to 11 for a short time as Crew-10 joins NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Don Pettit, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksandr Gorbunov, Alexey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner. Following a brief handover period, Hague, Williams, Wilmore, and Gorbunov will return to Earth no earlier than Wednesday, March 19.Ahead of Crew-9’s departure from station, mission teams will review weather conditions at the splashdown sites off the coast of Florida.