About half a lunar orbit later, on May 20th, 2012, the moon will also be in syzygy (I love that word!), this time between the earth and the Sun. It will be at apogee, but it will still cover most of the sun’s disk in an annular eclipse. The best place in the US to see this 94% extinction of sunlight will be Crescent City, California at about 630pm Pacific time. Here in Portland, Oregon it will be a crescent shaped instead of an annular ring, “only” about 88% occluded, but still quite spectacular.

Tonight, and probably two weeks from now, Portland will be covered with clouds. We won’t see much tonight, but we will still see a spooky dimming on the 20th. Unless the Mayan gods destroy us first

Almost all the media outlets seem to be channeling the astrologers and getting this wrong.

The quake NEVER happened. I was 15 at the time and thought it was stupid. Just goes to show you that there’s a lot of stupid people who believe anything that moves.

Sadly, it’s worse than that.

There’s a lot of people who’ll believe anything that moves unless that thing demonstrates a greater knowledge of the world.

The quake NEVER happened. I was 15 at the time and thought it was stupid. Just goes to show you that there’s a lot of stupid people who believe anything that moves.

Nobody is saying its a magical line across an imaginary distance. What we are merely saying is that there ‘may’ be a causal effect no matter how small. To just deny this simple statement makes you look like a religious zealot.

And the simple reply is this:
1. If there is a causal link, there will be a correlation.
2. People have sought a correlation between the moon’s position and earthquake frequency. There is none, unless you count only shallow earthquakes, and then the correlation is very weak (i.e. it could quite easily be an artefact of random variation in the data rather than evidence of a real relationship).
3. If the moon contributes to causing earthquakes, its effect is trivial next to all the other factors.

To bang on about a “possible link” that is “worth investigating” (my paraphrase of the general approach of the yeasayers) is lunacy. Yes, in principle there’s a possible link, but it really is not worth investigating. Why? Because it won’t get us any closer to practical earthquake prediction.

Anyone who is open to an honest assessment of the data can see that the relation of the moon’s position to earthquake occurrence is not worth spending any time or money on.

Last night on the excellent Brian cox 3rd instalment he described how the moon came to a stop…do you remember this process? A solid bulge of rock attracted to the earth created a ‘tidal’ wave across the moons waterless surface, which eventually slowed the moon to halt.
Read that again please; ‘waterless’.

Isn’t this the exact opposite to your statement earlier on comment 105?
‘That it only has an effect on water’
Come on, be honest.

I can see here that it is you being dishonest.

He never claimed that tidal forces only affect water. Just that the influence of tides on water is substantially more than it is on the Earth’s crust.

Gravity is generally considered the weakest force, but over large distances it becomes very powerful.

This is utter nonsense. Over large distances, gravity is less influential.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps you meant to refer to larger masses?

For all your maths sometimes scientists fail to see the obvious.

What here is “obvious” that others have missed?

Maths is useful but it doesn’t provide answers for everything, write me a mathematical formula to disprove that you’re angered by my response? You can’t can you? But anger is real.

Actually, with a month or so’s research, I could write just such a formula. It’s just down to the kinetics of the endocrine system, coupled to the psychology of the feeling of being under attack.

Would you care to pay my fee for that month’s work (a mere $25000 US)?

Don’t get me wrong, Science is still the best tool we have but don’t make it into a religion please.

No-one here has done this, and your attempt to show that someone has is dishonest and rather pathetic.

As to a question on the apparent size of the moon in that it looks so much larger when near the horizon, I though it was due to the illusion of having the comparison of buildings and trees or whatever near or in front of same. (Although in horizon vs overhead, hold a quarter at arms length and the moon will be the same size in relation to the quarter).

Not really.

If this were the case, then you could change the apparent size of the moon when it is high overhead simply by standing near a building to give you that size comparison.

Also, the moon illusion also happens when you are in the middle of a calm sea (and therefore there are no reference points against which the moon can look big).

Briefly, the moon illusion arises because:
1. We do not percieve the world as it really is. What we think we see is a model created by our brains from sensory input. Many experiments of various kinds have shown this to be so.
2. Our brain models the sky as a shallow upturned bowl, so objects in the sky near the horizon are modeled as being very distant, while objects directly overhead are assumed to be much closer. This makes a kind of sense if you consider the clouds on an overcast day – clouds overhead may be less than a kilometre away, while clouds close to the horizon may be several tens of kilometres distant.
3. In order to accommodate the “known” distance, our brain adjusts the size at which we perceive various objects (thus, a distant object that is known to be large will be perceived as large, even if it occupies the same proportion of our field of view as a much smaller object that is much nearer).
4. Because the moon retains essentially the same angular size in the sky all the time (OK, it varies by a few percent between apogee and perigee, but that is too small a difference for us to perceive without a direct side-by-side comparison), our brain models it differently depending on where in the sky it is. When it is high in the sky, it is assumed to be near, and therefore it is modelled as a small object, so it seems to be small. When it is near the horizon, it is assumed to be distant and so is modelled as a much larger object.
5. You can verify this by viewing the moon through a cardboard tube. When it is near the horizon (and therfore seems to be large), it has the same angular size as when it is overhead (and therefore seems much smaller). When you look at it through a cardboard tube, you can tell that its angular size is the same no matter where in the sky it is.