On New Year’s Night, there will be a rare blue moon. By definition, a blue moon is a moon that is full twice in a month, not an actual blue moon. :p

With a tide locked rotation, the moon undergoes all it’s phases in a 28 day (27 day, 7 hour, 43 minute, to be more exact) cycle, starting from New Moon, engorging itself through Waxing Crescent, to a half filled First Quarter then to the rotound Waxing Gibbous and finally to the beautiful Full Moon. Once the full moon begins to die down, it becomes a Waning Gibbous, then slowly emancipates itself to a Last Quarter, then to the waif of a moon Waning Crescent, then it continues to slim down until it disintegrates completely in the New Moon phase. After a few days, the moon is reborn as a sliver of light, and the cycle begins anew.

A New Years blue moon is extremely rare, with the last one happening back in 1990, almost twenty years ago! Holy crap I feel old.

If you went stargazing at any time this year, please head on over to the Japanese Space Agencies Stargazer website.

JAXA is trying to get an (unscientific) count of the number of people who went stargazing any time this year, the International Year of Astronomy. The site also has photo mosaics to look through, as well as reports to fill out, and read.

Even though we are in the waning days of the year 2009, please help this project reach their goal of ten million people whom have stargazed. After all, if you are in the northern hemisphere, the winter months have far more interesting objects to see.

From Science Daily comes word of the Hubble space telescope’s newest, and smallest find.

Using the Fine Guidance Sensors on the Hubble, the 3/5 mile wide Kuiper belt object was located 4.2 billion miles away. The magnitude 35 object, (5 orders of magnitude lower then what Hubble can detect) was discovered as the object occulted and diffracted the stars behind it.

In looking at over 12,000 hours of data, and over 50,000 stars, the Caltech team discovered a single 0.3 second long occultation event.

Straight from the BBC comes a report of seas upon another heavenly body. Cassini, the space probe in orbit around Saturn, has taken a picture of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and in that picture, one can see a hydrocarbon sea.

Back in 2005, when Cassini first appeared on the scene, it carried with it a probe, Huygens, which was dropped onto Titan. The Huygens mission provided beautiful images of a shoreline, rounded rocks, and amazing indicators of flowing liquid on the satellite of Saturn. A slide show of images is located on the ESA Cassini-Huygens page.

Although the data returned was ground-breaking, they Huygens probe ran out of power a few hours into its mission, thus forcing astronomers to use Cassini for more exploration of Titan.

Now, that dearth of information may be laid to rest. The Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) probe is being planned as the first lunar sailing ship. At a relatively inexpensive $400 million, the TiME boat will fly to Titan, land, and perform spectroscopic analysis of Titans lakes, depth sounding of basins, and help understand the geology and evolution of Titan.

If funded, the ship is currently planned for a 2016 launch, and a 2023 arrival date. I, for one, wish it clear skies, and smooth sailing.