SKY EVENTS: Get out your telescope and keep your eyes to the sky for a little dance of heavenly bodies over the weekend.
The Associated Press is reporting you may catch a glimpse of a comet and a penumbral lunar eclipse.
“The moon will pass into Earth’s outer shadow, or penumbra,” AP Aerospace writer Marcia Dunn writes of the eclipse. “The moon won’t be blacked out like in a full eclipse. Only part of the moon will be shaded, but it should be easily visible from much of the world.
According to the AP, Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova will be traveling at 51,120 mph and will glow green.“It will be an extremely close encounter as these things go, passing within 7.7 million miles (12.4 kilometers) of Earth.”
The eclipse will start at 5:32 p.m. Friday and will continue for more than four hours, Dunn stated.
Meanwhile, the comet will be visible Saturday morning in the constellation Hercules.
The National Weather Service Bureau in State College is calling for cloudy skies Friday night and Saturday morning locally, and we don’t know if the clouds will part long enough to get a good view of the sky. It will be quite chilly, too, with snow in the forecast.
Speaking of the National Weather Service, today is the agency’s birthday. Well, sort of.
“The beginning of the National Weather Service we know today started on Feb. 9, 1870, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed a joint resolution of Congress authorizing the Secretary of War to establish a national weather service.”
This is from the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The National Weather Service was placed under the umbrella — pun intended — of the NOAA in 1970.
The resolution instructed the secretary of war “to provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent and at other points in the State and Territories … and for giving notice on the northern (Great) Lakes and on the seacoast by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms,” according to the NOAA site.
Can you believe the National Weather Service is nearly 150 years old?
