Today’s big half moon + APOD mirrors
The moon is still relatively close to us today: we’ve got three months of the full moon happened at the closest point in the orbit (“supermoon”). There have now been two chances to see it looking relatively big for several days before and after full, and there will be one more such opportunity next month. A recent Astronomy Photo of the Day shows how much bigger the moon it looks at its biggest. This is why I’ve been taking lots of moon photos lately!
That and the new camera, of course. 🙂 📷 I used a tripod for this shot, but the camera freakishly doesn’t actually seem to need it—the stabilization is so good that a handheld shot was indistinguishable.
APOD isn’t offline, just NASA
New APOD posts haven’t been available at the usual NASA address since the government shutdown … but you can still get fresh posts from many mirror sites! So they are still posting new images as usual, just not on NASA.gov. They did the same thing during the 2013 shutdown. Here’s the full list of mirror URLs.
APOD is one of the oldest things on the Internet, and I’ve been reading it from the beginning in 1995. Thirty years of APOD! Thirty years of Internet!