The summer solstice June 21, 2013

MoonHowler

 

solstice_map_june2013_600

earthsky.org:

Why celebrate the solstice?  Cultures universally have had markers, holidays, and alignments – all related to the solstice.

It has been universal among humans to treasure this time of warmth and light.

For us in the modern world, the solstice is a time to recall the reverence and understanding that early people had for the sky.  Some 5,000 years ago, people placed huge stones in a circle on a broad plain in what’s now England and aligned them with the June solstice sunrise.

We may never comprehend the full significance of Stonehenge.  But we do know that knowledge of this sort wasn’t isolated to just one part of the world.  Around the same time Stonehenge was being constructed in England, two great pyramids and then the Sphinx were built on Egyptian sands.  If you stood at the Sphinx on the summer solstice and gazed toward the two pyramids, you’d see the sun set exactly between them.

Did you do anything special?  Did today seem longer than any other day?  Mine started off way too early.  I am fortunate I can make up for lost  sleep.

Time to get ready for the super moon this weekend.

Most “super” supermoon of 2013 on June 22-23

MoonHowler

Is everyone ready for the superest super moon this weekend?  Why is this the supermoon weekend?  The full moon is the nearest it gets to the earth in a year.

super moon 1

From earthsky.org:

…[A]stronomers call this sort of close full moon a perigee full moon.  The word perigee describes the moon’s closest point to Earth for a given month.  Two years ago, when the closest and largest full moon fell on March 19, 2011, many used the term supermoon, which we’d never heard before.  Last year, we heard this term again to describe the year’s closest full moon on May 6, 2012.  Now the term supermoon is being used a lot.  Last month’s full moon – May 24-25, 2013 – was also a supermoon.  But the June full moon is even more super!  In other words, the time of full moon falls even closer to the time of perigee, the moon’s closest point to Earth.  The crest of the moon’s full phase in June 2013, and perigee, fall within an hour of each other

Coming to a sky near you this weekend.  Hopefully skies will be clear..

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California Marijuana growers decimate the environment

MoonHowler

 

New  York Times:

marijuanaARCATA, Calif. — It took the death of a small, rare member of the weasel family to focus the attention of Northern California’s marijuana growers on the impact that their huge and expanding activities were having on the environment.

The animal, a Pacific fisher, had been poisoned by an anticoagulant in rat poisons like d-Con. Since then, six other poisoned fishers have been found. Two endangered spotted owls tested positive. Mourad W. Gabriel, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, concluded that the contamination began when marijuana growers in deep forests spread d-Con to protect their plants from wood rats.

That news has helped growers acknowledge, reluctantly, what their antagonists in law enforcement have long maintained: like industrial logging before it, the booming business of marijuana is a threat to forests whose looming dark redwoods preside over vibrant ecosystems.

Hilltops have been leveled to make room for the crop. Bulldozers start landslides on erosion-prone mountainsides. Road and dam construction clogs some streams with dislodged soil. Others are bled dry by diversions. Little water is left for salmon whose populations have been decimated by logging.

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