Moore Moon Marathon The Sky at Night

BOTH: Hello.

And welcome to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich here in London.

Tonight's programme is all about the moon

and we'll be finding out about the latest mission to go there

We'll also have the results from this summer's Moore Moon Marathon.

I know lots of you have taken part

and I'm really keen to find out how you got on.

Later this evening, we're hoping to catch a glimpse

of an intriguing lunar eclipse but, until then,

here's Pete Lawrence with what to see in November's night sky.

Astronomers are getting excited about comet ISON,

which is starting to produce a tail

as it nears and gets heated up by the sun.

At the start of November, the comet should be visible in the binoculars

close to the star Sigma Leonis which marks the rear paw of Leo

It passes very close to the stars Zavijava, or Beta Virginis,

on the morning of 7th November

and Porrima, or Gamma Virginis on the 13th.

On the 18th, ISON will be

very close to the star Spica, or Alpha Virginis.

The comet should be visible to the naked eye at this time.

With binoculars pointed at Spica,

you should be able to pick up the comet in the same field of view

As we head into the third week of November, the moon gets in the way

and the comet is only visible in the morning twilight.

One more thing for you to look at in November, the planet Jupiter,

which is in the eastern sky.

Throughout November it's located

close to the star Wasat in Gemini, the twins.

The charts to find the comet and Jupiter are on our website

This month's Sky At Night is from Greenwich

with astronomers converging on Blackheath Common.

Chris and I have been joined by Pete Lawrence

and Jon Culshaw to see the lunar eclipse.

What better time to announce the final of our Moore Moon Marathon?

Sir Patrick Moore, as a young astronomer, studied the moon.

I think the first explorers

may have some surprises

when they first step out of their craft

onto the barren, bleak moonscapes.

He spent thousands of hours building up lunar maps

which were later used by the Russians and Americans

when they went to the moon.

You can see the dark seas even without a telescope at all.

After all, the moon is by very much our nearest neighbour in space

Our nearest natural neighbour, that's to say.

Patrick always encouraged us

to look up and appreciate what's on our celestial doorstep.

We've tried to keep the spirit with our Moore Moon Marathon.

While Pete and I assemble our table of wares,

let's get the results from Chris and Jon.

Well, it has to be said, it's not the clearest of nights right now.

We've got plenty of astronomers

They're looking cheerful and enthusiastic and hopeful, so fingers crossed.

They certainly do, and one or two breaks in these clouds

which are giving us that sense of promise.

We might see a good view of that penumbral eclipse later

Let's hope so.

Before we get to that, let's talk about the Moore Moon Marathon.

We challenged you back at the start of the summer

to take a close look at the moon and thousands of you have taken part.

It's been wonderful to see people's enthusiasm. Terrific comments here.

Simon and Sarah Fisher from Worcestershire had a great deal of fun over the summer,

lots of clear nights. They had a really lucky run at it, actually,

and were able to go through all of their moon captures in great detail,

so a sense of the dedication there.

That's right. The waiting for clear skies is a bit of a theme.

Chris Goode from Devon says, "It took me over a few months to get

"all the information due to rubbish cloud cover," where he lives.

I sympathise with that. Dedication carried him through

Nice one here from David Winham in Newcastle.

"Looking at the moon, I had a feeling of intrigue and desolation,

"maybe magnificent desolation. Maybe I've become moonstruck."

I think you have, David, and we're glad of that.

Also moonstruck, Victor Suttle

who I think must be the youngest person so far.

He's five, in Essex, and he says, "I spotted the half moon and it was

"really tricky and it took me a long time." But well done for persevering.

Exactly. Half a moon is better than none at all, so well done for that.

Do you think so? I think so. Good. We'll settle for half a moon tonight.

Oh, there it is, through a little bit of hazy cloud.

These are the little glimpses that give us promise and hope.

It did vanish while you were saying that, Jon

Keith Moore from South Yorkshire enjoyed this,

"Very much enjoyed the MMM.

"Going to make it my quest to learn more about the moon,

"just like my namesake."

Well done to you. Well done, indeed.

And the Kilgore family from Glasgow took part in the MMM,

as I think we're going to call it from now on, in particular Alistair,

who enjoyed it so much he had a moon birthday cake.

So you can not only observe, but eat all of the features.

Well done, Alistair. A wonderful, award-winning cake, there. Indeed.

We'll come back to the Moore Moon Marathon in a moment

but, first, let's look at what's going to happen tonight

as Pete and Lucy explain the eclipse to us. It's gone again.

HE LAUGHS

Tonight's eclipse is slightly different, slightly unusual.

It comes down to the fact that there are two parts to the Earth's shadow.

You can illustrate that on the table, here. I'll have a go.

There we go. So, you've got the light passing over the Earth

and what I can see really clearly,

there's a dark centre to the shadow that we call the umbra

and then a slightly fainter shadow all the way around the edge

that we call the penumbra.

So, Pete, what is it that's happening tonight?

Tonight, the moon will be moving through the shadow,

but it's missing the main part in the middle

and it's moving through that outer fainter part, the penumbra,

so it's what is called a penumbral eclipse of the moon

So it's coming through here, is it? Yeah, that's right.

The best way to describe a penumbral eclipse

is to call it a subtle eclipse

If you were looking at it visually, you probably wouldn't see

much difference in the appearance of the full moon.

But if you take a photograph before the moon enters the penumbral shadow

and then another photograph of the moon when it's actually

in the penumbral shadow at the maximum part of the eclipse,

what you see is a very gentle shading close to the bit of the moon

which is closest to the darkest part of the shadow in space.

Still, it's a very special event

and it's one that I'm looking forward to seeing.

Our marathon has been divided into five sections

and the first is all about the lunar seas.

We've been joined on Blackheath Common by moon expert Katie Joy

Several people, including Pawel Kus from Poland

wanted to know about the seas, wanted to know how they formed

So, first of all, why do they look so different from the rest of the moon?

So on the moon we have two main rock types. These are my fake moon.

I'm not allowed to bring huge chunks of real moon out with me

It's a shame, really. It is a bit of a shame.

Essentially, we have two main rock types on the moon.

We have a white rock in the lunar highlands.

This is the very old rock.

And then we have lunar lava flows that were formed in volcanoes

and these are the material that formed those dark seas

that cover most of the nearside

that people have been spotting in the Moore Marathon.

So, this is the reason we have the seas - lava flows.

So, they're made of different stuff and so they're different colours?

Different colours, different chemistry, different minerals between the two.

The lunar seas appear to be a lot smoother as we look at the moon

is that true in reality?

The lunar seas are a lot younger,

so we have to go back to the origin of the moon

and talk about its early geology.

We think the moon formed about 4.5 billion years ago

in a giant impact event,

where a Mars-sized body crashed into the early Earth.

It spawns off a huge amount of material

and forms a magma body in space and then that magma body cools

and it forms an interior, a core, a mantle and a crust.

The crust that formed was made of this rock,

which is the very old highlands material.

Subsequently to that,

we had the lavas that were formed deep in the moon,

propagated through the crust

and erupted into large impact basins that are on the surface.

The reason they're so smooth is because the lavas were very runny.

They ran out and distributed very evenly

across some of these types of impact craters, making a smooth surface.

And they also haven't been heavily impact cratered like the highlands,

because they were a lot younger

It's kind of a twofold reason less impact craters

and smooth runny lava that made them.

Is this very different to the formation of

other moons in the solar system around Saturn and Jupiter?

Mars's moons, we hear, are captured asteroids,

so this sounds rather different It's a unique event, yeah.

Most of the other moons we think of are captured from bodies

moving in and then being gravitationally attracted

to their parent planets, but this is why the moon is so interesting,

it's a completely unique event and it tells us lots of information

about how the Earth formed and early terrestrial processes as well.

And also, because it's old, it's a

record of the early solar system as well.

There are some interesting results that come from counting craters

and looking at these older surfaces.

That's exactly why the moon is so important.

It's three days away, it is very easy to get to... Easy for you to say!

..it's accessible, it's 4.5 billion years old.

Well, if you've got a big spaceship, you can get there in three days

And it provides us with a record of the geological evolution

of the inner solar system over 4.5 billion years.

Much of that record has been lost on the Earth,

because we recycle our geology through plate tectonics

and other types of active geological processes,

but the moon is almost frozen in time.

The moon is really special for lots of reasons.

The lunar seas that we were talking about,

what a great starting point they were for the marathon,

great naked eye objects just to get you in there

and lead you on to the others.

Philip Jennings of York,

he was saying that the seas are a wonderful site with the telescope.

They certainly are, especially when rippled with wrinkled ridges

or crisscrossed with brighter crater rays at full moon.

A shame, then, that he locked himself out of his observatory

because he couldn't find the key. Oh, dear!

But this did remind him how wonderful the moon is to see

just with the naked eye, which is very true.

It is wonderful and there's no sign of it whatsoever,

so we're going to go to Pete and Lucy

to find out how some of the craters on the lunar surface formed.

Now, we're moving on to the second part of the Moore Moon Marathon

that looks at some of the features on the moon

that reflect its more violent history.

These are craters, bright and dark craters.

Pete, why did you choose these features?

Well, these are features which are easy to see

when the moon is fairly well illuminated.

I think they're pretty iconic, actually, on the moon's face.

There are very bright craters with very large rays coming off them and

also dark craters, which look like little lakes, if you like, of lava.

These are features that you perhaps need to have binoculars to see

so they're a little bit more challenging than the first

section of the Moore Moon Marathon.

Yeah, that's right.

Now, you mentioned rays, features of craters. We have a tray here

Now, you have a challenge because you can make a crater.

We've got flour underneath and cocoa powder

and chocolate on top and this is the asteroid.

To make this work, I've got to throw this hard into the tray,

so forgive me... I'm going to step back! OK. Go for it.

Oh, perfect!

Well, look at that. That is fantastic.

So, you've carved out the crater floor here, absolutely fantastic,

and all the bright material underneath has come into view.

So, it's gone across the dark floor of the sea there,

so this stands out as a ray crater.

So this would be a bright crater in a mare on the surface of the moon.

That's right, yes. Beautiful. And I can see the ejecta here.

And these would be the bright rays? That's right.

Tycho is a great example of that, of course,

in the southern part of the moon because it's got those bright rays

which extend right across the moon's face.

It's an iconic crater. And a lot of you really got excited by Tycho,

so I've got a comment from David Wenham from Newcastle.

And he says, "Tycho is spectacular to look at.

"The impact crater is so vast, which scars the moon."

And it really does, it spreads over a huge distance

I think that's my favourite crater to look at.

But this comment is lovely from Alan Fenner on the Wirral

He says, "If the moon was a giant fruit, Tycho would be the place

"where it hung from the tree." So this is a really lovely example.

You had bright and dark craters on your list.

So tell me a bit about how the dark craters form.

The dark craters, like Grimaldi which is a very distinctive marker

on the moon's face, is basically a crater where the floor of the crater

has become flooded with dark lava.

And they look very distinctive on the moon's face.

The craters you selected, they're all beautiful

but is there one that stands out as your favourite?

I think Copernicus, actually, because that's very well-defined crater

It's got great rays coming off from it. Just like this.

And it's got these beautiful terraced walls when you look at it.

They're sort of blocked down to the floor of the crater

And you can see that we have got that effect in our crater here

It does look like it.

Little terraces.

And that's formed as the lunar surface slumps back down again

Copernicus has got some fantastic mountains right in the centre.

So in the largest craters,

you get this central uplift as the rock becomes more plastic.

Yes, like a liquid. It comes back up and solidifies

I've got some more comments here that includes Copernicus.

It is a comment from David Scanlon in Hampshire and he says,

"Copernicus and Kepler, clearly obvious due to their size.

"Aristarchus, stunning, brightest lunar feature by far

"and awe-inspiring." Aristarchus is an interesting crater. It is.

It's a very young crater, very bright.

It's got those terraced walls again and very bright rays around it

So go to the website and find the location.

And we've got another comment here from Sammy Glastonbury.

"Kepler reminds me of a spider" OK. Do you see that?

It's never reminded me of a spider but it might do from now on.

Another comment here from Sarah and Simon Fisher from Worcestershire.

They said, "It was awesome to be able to use

"our own photos and name both the bright and the dark craters .

That's wonderful. Just wonderful. Really sums it up.

Now section 3 is craters in shadow.

We've got a demo here to illustrate how fantastic these craters look.

That's right. The reason I wanted to put these into the Moon Marathon

is that craters are really dramatic when they're very close

to the terminator, the line which marks the difference

between night and day on the moon.

And I can illustrate that with the sun again. The trusty sun.

And these fantastic models of craters.

In fact, if I illuminate this crater from above directly,

you don't get to see many of the relief features,

the features with the height on there.

But as the sun's angle starts to come down,

if you watch what happens inside it,

you can start to see the shadows growing in length.

Those craterlets have really become quite well defined. Yes.

You're absolutely right. I can suddenly see all the structure within the crater itself.

It's amazing. And look at the length of those shadows

as the sun starts to get lower and lower in the lunar sky.

Look at the central mountains there. Gosh.

Those mountains look enormous

because they have this huge triangular shadow.

There's suddenly huge drama to that crater. That's right.

And then suddenly it goes into complete darkness.

'Well, the eclipse is now well under way

and there are probably people who are enjoying a good sight of it.

If you could see the moon right now,

you would begin to notice a difference from an everyday moon.

We can't see anything.

Let's talk about the lunar surface again,

in particular David Scanlon from Hampshire talks about Clavius,

a wonderful myriad of younger craters over an older crater

which makes for superb exploration.

Yes, they really captured the imagination, the craters in shadow.

Tell us some more about Clavius, Katie.

There's a complex history here

Clavius is quite a large crater about 225km in diameter.

It has a rim around the edge that marks its exterior extent.

We don't know exactly when the crater formed

but we can count other craters that have been superimposed on top of it.

So we think that it's Nectarian in age

which is about 4 billion years ago.

Of course, we had other craters in shadow. What about Eratosthenes

I think that's...is that how you say it? Eratosthenes, is that it?

Yes, that's the elegant way of doing it. Very good. We'll let Jon say it. Eratosthenes.

Alan Fenner from the Wirral: "When I see Eratosthenes,

"I can't help but see..." ` I love these imaginative descriptions!

"I see the eye of a baby dinosaur

"with the Apennines as its neck and back".

Probably a young Polacanthus by that description. Yes, very good!

But, actually, that mention of the mountains

as the ridge of the dinosaur's back in that case

leads us on to Section 4, which was The Majestic Mountains.

And we had all sorts of comments. Keith Moore from South Yorkshire

just says, "Montes Jura on the terminator, wow!"

Quite simply, wow. Makes you think of future lunar mountaineers

who could probably climb the mountains rather easily

with that lower gravity, just floating up there.

And it wouldn't be quite so bad when you fell back down again.

It'd still be a long way down. But the mountains are spectacular.

They might not be as high as our mountains on Earth but they look wonderful

and Calum Kilgore saw the line of the Montes Jura disappearing

into space through binoculars and then later on

saw the whole semicircle of mountains through the telescope

thanks to his dad who got the telescope out in front of the neighbours.

So well done, Dad. I think that s the main takeaway from that one

Got the whole street talking! Indeed!

Over Blackheath in London,

the clouds have firmly set in

but, in Pennsylvania, they had clear skies.

The subtle shading in the bottom right of the moon

is the Earth's shadow.

In Massachusetts, a plane passed over the penumbral eclipse

and in Iran, you could see the Earth's shadow quite clearly.

There was a handy gap in the clouds over Stuttgart,

just enough for a glimpse of the moon.

Now it's a break from the moon and off to the planets

where we join Paul Abel,

who's been finding out about the latest research results.

Every year, astronomers who study the planets gather to share ideas and their research

It's the turn of London,

and University College London are the hosts.

Well, look at this. Isn't this stunning?

This is a beautiful panorama from Mars.

It's taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft

and it shows the beautiful, majestic ravines

and the windswept sand dunes of the red planet

and it really is an incredible image.

Research is presented on posters

which are put up for everyone to look at.

Some of this is rather technical.

Look at this lovely poster. This is about an extrasolar planet.

And this is really a sign of the times

because we haven't just got results here from our own solar system

but we have data from other planetary systems as well.

News from our solar system is always exciting.

Mike Brown is here to talk about the latest from Jupiter's moon, Europa.

It seems the oceans of Europa have salts not unlike our own.

Mike is more famously known

for discovering lots of Kuiper Belt objects

such as Sedna, Makemake and Quaoar.

Their exotic names give an air of mystery to objects that lurk

in the farthest regions of our solar system, well beyond Neptune.

I shall introduce you to our viewers,

if you don't mind, as the man who killed off Pluto.

That's a fair thing to say, isn't it? I think that's OK.

Why did you do that?

You know, my usual response when people ask me

is because it had it coming,

but really I did it,

I killed off Pluto sort of by accident.

I was actually looking for something

that I would think would be a 1 th planet, something bigger than Pluto,

some substantially-sized object in the outer solar system.

And by looking, we surveyed the entire the outer solar system

and realised that not only is there nothing really substantially

bigger than Pluto but there are many things

that are just essentially the same size as Pluto, which really meant

that Pluto is not as special as we used to think it was

and it really never deserved to be called a planet.

So actually, you're completely unrepentant about killing of poor Pluto?!

I'm actually very happy about it.

These objects are what we would class as trans-Neptunian objects,

that's the general umbrella term.

In fact, we more often commonly call them Kuiper Belt objects.

They are the coldest,

least-processed objects in the solar system and by processed I mean

if you look around at the Earth or any other planet,

everything you see started out in the early solar system

and then has been heated up and crunched together and extruded

and split apart and so it's very difficult to figure out what

really things were like at the very beginning.

As you move further and further out of the solar system,

things have never heated up very much

and not only have they not heated up very much

they haven't been thrown around by the planets quite as much,

so we can try to use what they're made out of and where they are

to figure out not just what things were like

in the very earliest solar system but how things have rearranged

since the solar system was formed.

And that's really the promise of this region out beyond Neptune.

If you could pick up a piece of it,

you're almost getting a little slice of the original cake

of the solar system, which is what you'd like to do. That's quite a thought!

These distant worlds have volcanoes and water ice.

They are far from boring and bland.

They have geology and some of them are large.

Eris is about the same size as Pluto yet it was only discovered in 2 05.

Could it be that there is an even larger world

lurking in the icy depths of our solar system, the infamous Planet X?

There's always the possibility that out in the Oort Cloud,

people have always speculated about a brown dwarf

or a Jupiter-sized thing.

I think that these days it's harder to speculate about that

because we actually have data that suggests there's nothing out there.

But you can always hide them somewhere.

People will forever speculate about these Jupiter-sized things out there. I suspect it's not true

I think the biggest things that are still out there

are going to be Mercury or Mars-sized.

They're going to be very far away, very faint, hard to find and hard to study

But I bet they're out there.

We have discovered around 1,000 Kuiper Belt objects,

all in the past two decades.

The first was found in 1992 by Dave Jewitt and is called QB1.

Dave has come to London to talk about something new

and to solve an old mystery.

So asteroids have been known for 200 years or something like that

and I figured it's all over,

we know everything you ever want to know about asteroids.

It turns out there's this population that's been there all the time but it was only just discovered

They are asteroids by their orbits,

but they look like comets. Confusing!

And it's very freaky because an asteroid

you would think is a rock and a rock looks like a rock,

and nothing ever happens and it's kind of boring but they look like comets,

they release material, they eject dust.

And it's just very bizarre. So I'm trying to explore this population.

We don't have many. There's like 10 or 12 known at the present time.

But we're looking at these things, trying to understand what they are.

And they're part of this general phenomenon

that we call the active asteroid phenomenon. Wow.

By which an object that you think should just be a boring, inert rock

somehow is able to be active and eject material.

The Geminid meteor shower graces our winter skies every year.

And it's the asteroid Phaethon which creates them.

Phaethon, it seems,

is one of these new type of asteroids which acts like a comet.

Phaethon is in an elliptical orbit that goes all the way into 0.14 AU.

So that's quite close to the sun.

It goes seven times closer to the sun than we are.

So it gets 50 times more sunlight than we get,

so it gets really hot at the perihelion.

And in this particular case,

what I think is happening is that it gets so hot that it cracks,

it thermally fractures, just like if you take a glass of orange juice,

you drink the orange juice, you stick it in the sink to wash it,

you hit it with hot water and the glass will crack

because of thermal expansion of the glass.

Probably that happens to the surface of this body.

So it gets really hot and this material just flows out and this,

we think, is responsible for our Geminid meteor stream

later in the year when the Earth passes through it?

That's what I think. Sounds like fascinating stuff.

What sort of things do you hope to get in the future?

You hope to discover more of these objects, presumably?

We've found this zoo of very strange objects lurking in the asteroid belt

and we'd just like to understand what they are.

We live in interesting times, Dave. Thank you very much. OK, you're welcome.

There is always time for a spot of R'n'R at these conferences.

I bet Pete would be good at this. Oh!

No luck with my lunar rover.

Houston, we have a problem. Oh, dear.

That's why I don't drive, incidentally.

NASA had better not rely on me

Time now to go back to Blackheath Common for our last section

in our Moore Moon Marathon, which Pete's called The Lunar Specials.

It's one in the morning here at Blackheath

and we're still going strong.

Somewhere there's somebody having a good view of the eclipse,

which is at maximum about now, but it's not us.

Yes, we can't see it but we know it's there.

Completely overcast but there's nothing one can do

No, absolutely not. We should move on to the Lunar Specials.

Christina Chester from Hertfordshire,

who is here somewhere, found a migrating duck

and a puppy with its bone up in the lunar highlands.

That's quite strange!

Well, Richard Bailey from Daventry says, "Thanks to Mr Culshaw,

"I now see a Cyberman on the moon." I know how he feels.

Sorry to ruin the old lady of the moon.

I think she's more like the lady from Downton Abbey,

I've rethought that one!

And Stephen Brown from Middlesbrough says, "The ghost crater Stadius

"was the hardest feature of the marathon for me,

"but I managed just about to make it out," so well done.

We also had some complaints about Rupes Recta,

various people got lost trying to find this.

Sammy Glastonbury said, "It was very, very, very hard to find.

"Very frustrating". Alan Fenner from the Wirral said that.

He said, "Other people seem to be able to get great views

"of Rupes Recta but I always find it very difficult. Harumph "

Well done to everyone who took part in our Moore Moon Marathon

And especially if you managed to complete it.

There's a cosmic congratulations to Wayne Young and his son, Thomas

who completed all three of Patrick's observing marathons.

Quite an achievement.

Our guides on what to see on the moon are still on our web page at:

You can also find Pete's charts

to find comet ISON over the next few weeks.

We've had a fantastic time here

so thank you to everyone who stayed with us.

That's thanks to the Flamsteed Astronomical Society

and the Baker Street Irregular Astronomers.

When we come back next month, we'll be heading for the clear skies

of La Palma in the Canary Islands, hoping to find a bright comet.

So until next month, good night

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