Listen to “Lune”

NASA Science Visualization Labs’ Ernie Wright has created a beautiful visual compliment to De Bussey’s classic piano composition, ‘Claire De Lune’. Using images from NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting and photographing the moon in close-up high resolution since 2009, Wright’s video matches stunning images of the moon’s surface in a smooth-flowing visual montage that both reinvigorates the music and shows the moon’s changing appearance over the course of a lunar day.

Just about this time last year, about 154 million Americans went outside to experience a total solar eclipse. Next total across the US: April 8, 2024! Still have solar eclipse glasses? As long as they’re in good condition, you can use them to look at the sun safely anytime. Want to preserve them? Keep them in an envelope somewhere safe, like inside a book.

Here’s a mind-bender for you: one of Stephen Hawking’s best buds, physicist Roger Penrose, suggests that the ‘black hole doom’ from a previous universe would not only leave a dead universe with the ultra-compressed environment that might be found just before a ‘big bang’ event was to jump off, but it would leave traces of those shrinking black holes in our cosmic microwave background, the remnant of our universe’s birth. Sort of like a watermark in fine papers, these cosmologists are suggesting that as the past universe’s black holes evaporated, the massless photons and gravitons that escaped as Hawking radiation (Hawking suggested that black holes lose mass and energy slowly and shrink up), wouldn’t experience time or distance. It would be the Hawking radiation that would survive to create the ‘fossil’ print’ of the previous black hole. Penrose’s 2010 paper claiming to have identified Hawking points has been dismissed by others as random noise errors in their data. What’s next in this grand claim? More tests of course!