NASA will launch three sounding rockets during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, to study how Earth's upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet.

The Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) sounding rockets will launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to study the disturbances in the ionosphere created when the moon eclipses the sun. The sounding rockets had been previously launched and successfully recovered from White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, during the October 2023 annular solar eclipse.

The worm moon has risen. The final full moon of winter in the northern hemisphere appeared on March 25 and owes its name to Native Americans who noted winter's end by the trails of earthworms it illuminated on the newly thawed soil.

Common names of full moons generally come from seasonal animals, colors or crops: wolf moon, pink moon, harvest moon. But the worm moon may be losing its significance, as climate change leads to wetter summers and milder winters in much of the world. I've been an earthworm scientist for more than three decades, and, of late, I'm seeing signs of worms at the surface in months when they used to be inactive.

To track how the worm moon might be changing we can look at a particular earthworm species (Lumbricus terrestris, aka the dew worm, nightcrawler or lob worm) which is unusually easy to track. Also sometimes called the common earthworm, if you see a big worm in the garden, it's likely to be this species.

Most worms spend most of their lives underground, but the dew worm almost completely leaves its deep burrow, with tail tip left in, as it ventures on to the soil surface every night to feed on dead leaves.