'Super harvest moon' rose tonight

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABP...2012971236.jpg http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABP...2012971279.jpg

It comes but once every 20 years, a spectacular coincidence of summer verging into fall, as a rising harvest moon lights the evening sky just as the last sunset of summer glimmers out.

Called a "super harvest moon" for its spectacular apparent size and shimmering light, the moonrise at 6:28 p.m. Wednesday rings in fall as the season turns.

Wednesday marks the autumnal equinox, when night and day lengths are equal. It's the beginning of fall, to many our most poignant season, as the Northern Hemisphere begins its turn away from the sun, taking us into ever longer nights until Dec. 21, the winter solstice, when we swing back toward the light once more.

Now is our season on the verge, a time of endings and beginnings: Seeds studding the blossom ends of spent flowers are setting wing on autumn winds for a new year's growth. Female salmon in their last days of life are returning, their bellies rounded with eggs that will bring their home waters to life next spring.

And deep in the cool glades of the lowland forests, amphibians are on the move.

The crrrrrreck of chorus frogs can be heard in the forests, as they return upland for the winter. Frogs, toads and salamanders are on their fall migration, inching to their winter hiding spots. They'll snug under the sheltering arms of sword ferns and heaps of big leaf maple leaves, just now kiting to ground, shining as they sail through the slanting, golden light of fall.

But the showstopper all this week — clouds willing — will be the moon. Already bright enough this week to wake light sleepers, it's just been revving up for the perfectly full harvest moon.

Its majestic rise and luminous glow were once counted on by farmers to get in their crops, before headlights on megatractors changed all that. Hence the name harvest moon, also called the hunter's moon by some.

While it will be perfectly full only on Wednesday, the moon should still be big and bright for several days. It also might take on a coppery hue at the horizon, as its light passes through more atmosphere, low in the sky, with all its dust and other particulates. That scatters the moon's light, filtering out the blues in its spectrum, and leaving the red.

As for its seemingly supernatural size, that is an optical illusion no one can quite explain, says Tony Phillips, a California astronomer on contract with NASA. With all of our gizmos, gadgets and computers, no one has yet cracked the mystery of why the rising moon low on the horizon appears bigger to the human eye than it really is.

"It is a trick the human brain plays on us, and no one is entirely sure why," Phillips said.

As if all that were not enough, Jupiter also is having a decade-class close encounter with Earth right now. It is the brightest body in the heavens, besides the moon, and right next to it in our view. The sun is erupting with a major sunspot, a giant island of magnetism on the sun's surface crackling with solar flares, flashes of radiation, and spewing clouds of gas. It's a disturbance big enough to maybe even stir up the northern lights here on Earth later this week, Phillips said.

That all seemed lost on a Douglas squirrel, building its cache of hemlock boughs studded with cones at a local park. Nearby, a giant rough-skinned newt was all business as it ground along the forest floor, setting one tiny foot in front of the other, perhaps en route to its wintering grounds.

Or, maybe like us, it was out for a last summer foray before the turn of the season.

Source: The Seattle Times