Copernical Team
Full moon rising: The first lunar spectacle of 2023 is this weekend's wolf moon
If you lift your eyes to the sky Friday night, you can catch the first full moon of 2023—the wolf moon.
The full moon can best be seen at 6:08 p.m. EST on Friday and will appear full through Sunday morning, according to NASA.
"Look for the moon to rise from the northeastern horizon around sunset that evening," according to the Old Farmer's Almanac.
This is the first of 13 full moons in 2023, the Old Farmer's Almanac said.
The moon is also known as a micromoon, because the moon, which circles the Earth in an elliptical orbit, is farther from the Earth, said Space.com.
Why is it called the wolf moon?
The first full moon of the year is known as the wolf moon because historically it was believed during the winter wolves howled more at night because they were hungry, the Old Farmer's Almanac said.
The name has stuck even though there are doubts about the accuracy of the wolf moon moniker.
Why is it also called a micromoon?
For this full moon, the moon will be about 250,000 miles from Earth.
Historic UK rocket mission set for liftoff
Final preparations were under way Monday for the first rocket launch from UK soil, catapulting it into the "exclusive" club of nine nations able to send crafts into Earth's orbit.
A repurposed Boeing 747 carrying the 70-foot (21-meter) rocket containing nine satellites will take off from a spaceport in Cornwall, southwest England, at 2216 GMT.
The rocket will detach from the aircraft at a height of 35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean to the south of Ireland before later discharging the satellites.
The aircraft will then return to Spaceport Cornwall, a consortium that includes Virgin Orbit and the UK Space Agency, at Cornwall Airport Newquay.
The launch will be the first from UK soil. UK-produced satellites have previously had to be sent into orbit via foreign spaceports.
"Joining that really exclusive club of launch nations is so important because it gives us our own access to space... that we've never had before here in the UK," Spaceport Cornwall chief Melissa Thorpe told BBC television on Monday.
Over 2,000 people are expected to watch the launch named "Start Me Up" after the Rolling Stones song.
Old NASA satellite falls harmlessly from sky off Alaska
Sentinel-1 and AI uncover glacier crevasses
Scientists have developed a new Artificial Intelligence, or AI, technique using radar images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite mission, to reveal how the Thwaites Glacier Ice Tongue in West Antarctica is being damaged by squeezing and stretching as it flows from the middle of the continent to the coast. Being able to track fractures and crevasses in the ice beneath the overlying snow is key to better predicting the fate of floating ice tongues under climate change.
Join the hive: send your ideas for CubeSat swarms
We all know the saying that there is strength in numbers. The next revolution in space technology could be the use of swarms of tiny spacecraft, called CubeSats, that work together to achieve things greater than what any lone spacecraft can. CubeSats, assemble!
OneWeb to launch 40 satellites with SpaceX
OneWeb, the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications company, will launch 40 satellites with SpaceX no earlier than Sunday, 8 January 2023, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This launch will be OneWeb's sixteenth to date and its second with SpaceX following a successful launch in December, keeping the company on track to deliver global coverage in 2023.
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