This week: Polynesian dance in Fremont, a new cat cafe in SF, a South Bay Batman, book clubs of the Peninsula, and California pollinators. Also, examining an ancient Greek star map using physics; supporting stroke survivors; and highlighting the unsettling parts of suburban life.

Traces in the margins

In Menlo Park, a lab built for cutting-edge physics is being used to recover something far older. Researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are using x-ray imaging to look through layers of ancient parchment, revealing a star map that was written in ancient Greece and later scraped away.

By analyzing the chemical makeup of old inks and metals, the team can reconstruct what once sat on the page, even when nothing is visible to the eye. The work offers a rare glimpse into how early astronomers charted the sky and how fragile that record can be. — NBC Bay Area

Other hands in the garden

As gardens start to wake up for spring, it’s a good moment to notice the many quiet pollinators preparing for their busiest season, from hummingbirds and native bees to butterflies and even flies, all getting ready to carry color and life from plant to plant.

Pollination shapes about 80% of flowering plants and most food crops, from cocoa and bananas to agave, while cross-pollination keeps species resilient through genetic diversity. In California, where roughly 1,600 native bee species live, understanding these roles matters as introduced honeybees compete for resources and spread disease. — Marin Independent Journal

Rooms for whiskers and lounging

At Whiskerwood Haven in SF’s Inner Richmond, cats arrive through a network of foster homes and step into a space designed to show who they really are. The lounge lets people spend time with them, watch their temperaments unfold, and make more thoughtful matches than a quick shelter visit allows.

Whiskerwood Haven is open daily from 11 am to 7 pm. — Richmond Sunset News

Cul-de-sacs and quiet weather

Jonathan Crow paints the California suburb as a place where light, color, and unease share the same frame. Drawing from childhood memories, film training, and a life split between parenting and the art studio, his scenes hold ordinary spaces open long enough for something unsettled to surface.

Pools, gardens, and abandoned carts become stages for moods shaped by politics, memory, and the strange calm of residential life. Crow’s solo show, Cul-de-Sac, is on view at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara through May 3, with a reception on January 24. — 48 Hills

A cape in the margins

For nearly eight years, the Batman of San Jose has walked the city at night with water, food, and first-aid supplies, building trust with people living unhoused. What began as a teenager’s response to discrimination has grown into a mix of street outreach and public advocacy, including speaking at City Hall and pushing for housing-first policies.

His costume is practical as much as it is symbolic, stocked with medical gear and a cape that can double as an emergency blanket. The work now extends beyond him through Bay Area Superheroes, a small mutual-aid collective active across San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland. — KQED

Small circles, open books

Book clubs across the Peninsula are giving people simple ways to meet through libraries and independent bookstores. Some focus on graphic novels, others on short novellas, cookbooks, or quiet “silent reading” sessions.

Many are open to the public and built to feel low-pressure, whether that means shorter books, casual discussion, or just reading alongside others. Groups meet in places like Mitchell Park Library in Palo Alto, Fireside Books & More in Redwood City, Sanchez Library in Pacifica, and Feldman’s Books in Menlo Park. — Mountain View Voice

Life after stroke

After a severe stroke in 2010, Debra Meyerson had to leave her tenured Stanford job and relearn how to speak, while grappling with her sense of identity. She and her husband, Steve Zuckerman, turned that experience into Stroke Onward, a nonprofit supporting survivors beyond medical recovery.

They’ve since organized a 4,500-mile tandem bike ride, launched live storytelling through the Stroke Monologues, and created an online community connecting survivors, care partners, and medical professionals. — KPIX

Waves in motion

In a Fremont industrial park, the Hula Halau ‘O Nalua fills the room with drums, chants, and synchronized movement that pulls dancers into the rhythms of Hawaii and Tahiti. Students of all ages glide through Kahiko, hula ‘Auana, and Ote’a, connecting to ancestry, culture, and each other.

For many, hula goes beyond steps and rhythms, offering a break from the daily grind, a moment of focus, and a link across generations. The school, approaching its 50th year, also tours internationally and fosters community through ongoing performances and family involvement. — Bay Area News Group

Top image: Jonathan Crow

Previously: Field Notes: Suitcases for Foster Youth, an East Bay Roundhouse, and a Teen Artist in ‘70s-Era Berkeley

A comet that likely has never been viewed by modern humans, and was last visible from Earth at the time of the Neanderthals, will come in its closest path by our planet on Saturday, and you may be able to see it with your naked eye for several weeks in a row.

It's been named C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, and it was simultaneously discovered for the first time last year by China's Tsuchinshan Observatory and an Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, telescope in South Africa (hence its name). As CNN reports, the comet reached perihelion, or its closest orbit point to the sun, on September 27 while it was visible only in the Southern Hemisphere. And now, it's expected to be visible from the Northern Hemisphere just after sunset from mid-October to early November.

On Saturday, C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will come within 44 million miles of Earth, and it should be readily visble with a long tail at twilight.

"It’s not going to zing across the sky like a meteor. It will just appear to hang there, and it will slowly change position from night to night," says Bill Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, speaking to CNN. "If you can see (the comet) with your unaided eye, (using) the binoculars will knock your socks off."

The comet comes from the Oort Cloud, a collection of comets that is only barely bound by gravity to our sun — and astronomers were unsure whether the comet would survive this trip past the sun, or perhaps break apart this time. But its ice, rocks, and frozen gases appear to be staying intact.

In San Francisco, it may be too cloudy Saturday evening to see the comet — which you should look for in the western sky. A live feed is being broadcast on YouTube by the Virtual Telescope Project, which looks like it will start Saturday morning Pacific Time.

By Sunday, though, we may be able to get a glimpse if skies clear — and those in other parts of the Bay Area and elsewhere in the US will likely start posting photos if they spot it Saturday.

And you should try to see it! As astronomer Dr. Teddy Kareta, a postdoctoral associate at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, tells CNN, comets this bright and visible without a telescope don't come along often.

"For many people, and especially children, seeing a bright comet in the night sky is a beautiful and life-changing experience,” Kareta tells CNN. "Even if every couple of years a comet might be barely bright enough to be seen with your naked eye, comets that have a potential to be easily visible to many are rare. If you can try to see it, you should — and you should take whoever you can with you so they can experience it too."

The Bay Area did get to see Comet NEOWISE in the pandemic summer of 2020, and in December 2021, we had a flyby from Comet Leonard, which also had never been seen humans before, and likely won't be again.

Photo by cafuego/Wikimedia

What appeared to be a fleet of invading space alien ships above Sacramento and much of Northern California Friday night spurred plenty of Cloverfield chatter, but it was apparently just flying, discarded parts from the International Space Station.

Quite a shock for people in Sacramento who were drunk and/or high on St. Patrick’s Day at roughly 9:30 p.m. on Friday night. As seen below, revelers saw the central California skies alight with lights moving consistent with the appearance of what you’d figure it would look like if aliens were invading planet Earth.

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A post shared by King Cong Brewing Company (@kingcongbrewing)

But KPIX confirms the streaks of light were space debris from the International Space Station. “The U.S. Space Force confirmed the re-entry path over California for the Inter-Orbit Communication System,” which had once been part of the International Space Station, KPIX reports. (Yes, that agency still has the Trump-era name “Space Force.”)

“What you saw was the breakup of a communications module that had been attached to the International Space Station,” Chabot Space and Science Center adjunct astronomer Gerald McKeegan told NBC Bay Area in the video above. “In 2020, after they were no longer using it, they detached it and just let it drift in orbit. And eventually that orbit decayed, and it reentered the atmosphere over central California.”

SFGate directs us to the above tweet, which shows us what the contraption looked like before it burned to bits on reentry, thereby creating Friday’s light show.

“The hope was that it would reenter on the next orbit, where it would be out over the Pacific Ocean. Most of the earth is covered with water,” McKeegan continued. “This one happened to come down a little earlier than expected.”

But even if it wasn’t an alien invasion, is there any risk this space junk could strike people, or strike areas that could the suffer enormous fires? Astronomers think not.

“Likely, most of it broke up and burned in the atmosphere as it first encountered the thin air at that altitude, and friction caused it to break up and burn apart. And you could clearly see that’s what was happening as they were coming down,” McKeegan said.

Likely????

Related: Weird Lights Over The Mission Fuel Nationwide UFO Rumors. Are They Coming For Our Hipsters? [SFist]

Image: ArthurM40330824 via Twitter

The best pictures ever of the biggest planet in the solar system have been unveiled, and it turns out an astronomer at UC Berkeley played a major role in making them happen.

A stellar new set of images of a planet that is 380 million miles away were released on Monday, but they come to us largely because of the work of an astronomer just a few miles away on the other side of the Bay. NASA released a new set of images of Jupiter, taken by the Webb Space Telescope (yes, the telescope with the controversy over who it’s named after).

The images are stunning, and give us some of our best looks ever at Jupite’s moons, auroras, and of course, its celebrated “red spot.” The spot, which is actually a very big storm that is larger than the planet Earth, appears as white in these images because of the reflection of the sun.

Yet there’s a local angle to the out-of-this world story. As KTVU reports, “A Bay Area scientist was the principal investigator. Imke de Pater, a UC Berkeley professor emerita of astronomy and planetary sciences, led the team of experts who were analyzing the data.”

“We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” de Pater said in a NASA press release. “It’s really remarkable that we can see details on Jupiter together with its rings, tiny satellites, and even galaxies in one image,” she said.

This is not exclusively a UC Berkeley project. CNN explains that Professor de Pater is working on the Webb telescope’s Jupiter observations with Paris Observatory professor Thierry Fouchet. And the Webb telescope “is itself an international endeavor by NASA with the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency,” according to CNN, and is “using infrared light to reveal otherwise invisible aspects of the universe.”

Okay, yes, the photos have been “doctored,” so to speak, in that they’re really just packets of data that the telescope sent from the outer realms of the solar system. They’ve been rendered into what the data tells us the planet would look like to the naked human eye, a process also largely handled in northern California by a Modesto image processor named Judy Schmidt.  

"They don't look like this straight from the telescope," de Pater told KTVU, adding that Schmidt “made a mosaic of 32 different pieces."

But let’s cut right to the big question here: Are we going to see pictures of aliens? There is a not-zero chance that yes, we might.

“The telescope is also discovering and observing exoplanetary systems, which each consist of a planet outside of our solar system and its host star,” as CNN explains. “Some of these exoplanets are potentially habitable, and peering into their atmosphere could uncover clues in the ongoing search for life outside of Earth.”

Related: NASA Satellite Image Shows Blanket Of Smoke From Northern California Wildfires [SFist]

Images: NASA

Also known as C/2021 A, the Comet Leonard will be visible all month, and early mornings are your best time to see it. But you’ll probably need binoculars.

We’ve had some pretty good celestial phenomena up in the skies over the last few years. We had the “unicorn” meteor storm in 2019, the much better Quadrantid meteor shower in early 2020, and the Comet NEOWISE passing through in the summer of 2020.

Now 2021 is getting a pretty good show too, as KRON4 reports that the “once-in-a-lifetime” Comet Leonard is now visible, and it’s been described by EarthSky as “likely to be 2021’s best comet, and its brightest comet by year’s end.”

Named for astronomer Greg Leonard, who first spotted it back in January, Comet Leonard has probably been blazing toward our Sun for 35,000 years, going 158,084 miles per hour, after being formed 4.5 billion years ago — and whatever loop it may be on, Earthlings aren't going to see it ever again.

Leonard’s technical name is C/2021 A, and December will be its most visible month here in the northern hemisphere. “The comet is currently heading sunward, toward its perihelion (closest point to the sun) on January 3, 2022,” EarthSky says. “Comets are typically brightest around perihelion. Comet Leonard has been in the morning sky, and it just passed the beautiful globular star cluster M3.”

This fellow in the video above is Pat Prokop of Savannah, Georgia, who's been posting some terrific pictures and video (because he has a Orion EON ED triplet apochromatic refractor telescope). He got great shots when the comet passed that above-mentioned M3 star cluster on Friday. “The comet seemed a little bit brighter this morning, about a Magnitude 6 now, a week ago it was 8.5," h said in a December 3 video. "So it is getting brighter. However, I don’t think it’s going to become a naked eye comet. It might. But it will be very dim in the morning sky. And after December 12, it will start reappearing in the evening sky, below the planet Venus.”

A sort of “Comet Leonard fan account” on Twitter points out that there are only five more mornings of comet viewing. Griffith Observatory astronomer Ed Krupp tells NPR, "The comet is in the early morning sky right at the moment, and that means getting up very early, probably around 5 a.m. or so and looking more or less to the northeast." Leonard is expected to be less bright when it moves into its evening phase on December 12, but that may change.

“Comets are notoriously difficult to predict in terms of brightness and visibility,” a NASA spokesperson told KRON4. “Comet Leonard is predicted to peak at a brightness that will probably require binoculars to spot it. There’s a chance it could be bright enough to see with the unaided eye, but again, with comets, you really never know.”

Related: Google Celebrates Discovery Of New Planets With Painfully Adorable Animated Doodle [SFist]

Screenshot: HeavenlyBackyardAstronomy via Youtube

A meteor shower that is expected to go on through January 10 will peak tonight around midnight on the West Coast. It will be low to the horizon, but will at least be more visible than that November "unicorn" shower, which was a bust for California.

As the American Meteor Society explains, the Quadrantid meteor shower takes its name from the obsolete constellation Quadrans Muralis (Mural Quadrant). Star-watchers can now see the Quadrantids near the handle of the Big Dipper, or within the "herdsman" constellation known as Boötes.

These meteors have been observed since at least 1825, and unlike most meteor showers that originate from the debris of comets, the Quadrantids are believed to originate from an asteroid, or possibly a dead comet, and they can create some dramatic fireballs in the sky because of the perpendicular angle in which they hit Earth's atmosphere.

The peak tonight will occur around 12:20 a.m. Pacific Time, or 3:20 Eastern, though on the West Coast you will need to train your eye toward the horizon and avoid light pollution — also the waxing moon will not have set out here, which also might complicate viewing. The peak is expected to include around 100 meteors per hour for about six hours.

As Lifehacker notes, the next time this particular shower will be visible in North America won't come until 2028, so you may want to take a shot at seeing it while you can.

If you’re not heading to Oregon with your hippie friends or attempting to conceive a child with a Craigslist rando during Monday morning’s first full eclipse of the sun visible in the U.S. since 1979, there are still plenty of spots to watch the sun get blotted out by the moon. While the LA Times informs us that we’ll only get a 75 percent eclipse here in the Bay Area at the peak 10:30 a.m. moment, it’s still a pretty unique phenomenon and — since it’s taking in the middle of the sky — will be visible from everywhere (and for the nth time, you should not stare at the sun without those stupid glasses). But we’ve aggregated a long list of places hosting Monday morning eclipse viewing parties, so you can turn around, bright eyes, every now and then fall apart, because there’s you something you can say for the total eclipse of the sun.

As far as those stupid glasses go, the Chronicle reports that they’re pretty scarce to come by right now. But the Exploratorium still has them for $2.75 a pop, and Lick Observatory (which is all the way down in San Jose!) has them for $2.50 apiece. Additionally, the American Astronomical Society has some instructions on how to make those elementary school style pinhole projectors plus a list of “reputable” eclipse goggle vendors.

But nothing could be more San Francisco than watching the eclipse on your phone, and the Exploratorium will let you do just that. ABC 7 calls our attention to the Exploratorium eclipse livestream, which will also be broadcast via their Total Solar Eclipse app for iOS and Android that will have feeds from prime spots in Oregon and Wyoming, with background jams provided by Kronos Quartet.

...And Twitter will be livestreaming it too, in collaboration with The Weather Channel.

CBS 5 has a nice list of Bay Area eclipse watching parties happening Monday morning, and we’ve gone through the list and noted which ones require admission fees or advance RSVP.

Total Solar Eclipse: Live from the U.S.A.
The Exploratorium, Pier 15 (The Embarcadero at Green Street)
9 a.m., Adult tickets $29.95

The Great American Solar Eclipse
California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Drive
9:30 a.m., General admission $35.95

Eclipse Viewing and Toddler Storytime
Ortega Branch Library, 3223 Ortega Street (between 39th Avenue and 40th Avenue)
9 a,m., free, glasses available on a first come first serve basis

Partial Solar Eclipse
Chabot Space & Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland
8 a.m., free, but glasses are sold out

Partial Eclipse - Viewing Party!
Oakland Main Library, 125 14th Street, Oakland
9:30 a.m., free, but glasses are sold out

Alameda Free Library to View the Eclipse
Alameda Free Library, 1550 Oak Street, Alameda, CA
9 a.m., free, glasses not provided

Alameda County Library
Various branches
9 a.m., free, but glasses are sold out

Solar Eclipse 2017
Houge Park, Twilight Drive & White Oaks Avenue, San Jose
9 a.m., free with RSVP, glasses not provided

Related: ABC News Anchor In 1979 Hoped For A 'World At Peace' During 2017 Eclipse

99.5% waxing gibbous. I needed to be out there like five minutes earlier. Not the coolest foreground, but when you are rushing around at the last minute, you take what you can get. The #fomo took hold! 😂 #almostfullmoon . . . . . #grizzlypeak #berkeleyhills #supermoon #sanfrancisco #california #igerssf #alwayssf #wildbayarea #wildcalifornia_ #rawcalifornia #liveauthentic #california_igers #abc7now #sfgate #visitcalifornia #optoutside #nothingisordinary_

A photo posted by Trina (@pixelmama) on Nov 13, 2016 at 7:06pm PST

Last night's supermoon, which will continue to put on a dramatic show Monday evening after hitting peak fullness early Monday morning, made for some very pretty photos.

As noted yesterday, this is the second to last supermoon of the year, and the closest one we'll see for the next two decades — the moon won't be as close to the Earth as it is now again until 2034.

If you've got a stunner of a photo you'd like us to add, feel free to send it to tips@sfist.com.

The moonset early Monday morning. Photo: David Yu

Previously: Check Out The Biggest Supermoon In Decades Tonight

The second of three so-called supermoons in 2016 arrives Sunday night into Monday morning, and as Space.com tells us, this is the closest supermoon since January 1948 and the moon won't be this close to earth again until 2034, 18 years from now. (And no, I don't know why the super dramatic music was necessary in the video above.)

The moon will be 221,524 miles away from Earth, which is within 85 miles of its closest possible approach. Also, the Cold Moon in December will also be a supermoon.

Officially, the moon becomes full Monday morning around 9 a.m., well after sunrise, but it will appear full Sunday night as well, with the orb hitting its closest point to Earth at 6:15 a.m.

As KRON 4 explains, supermoons appear 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than normal full moons.

Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, for one, hates the term "supermoon," which was invented by the media in recent years. "I don't know who first called it a supermoon," he says. "I don't know, but if you have a 16-inch pizza, would you call that a super pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza?"

According to the Exploratorium, there are just 100 miles in Southeast Asia from which a total Solar Eclipse, the astronomical event of the year, will be visible. Wait, you couldn't get to Micronesia in time? Well, even if you're out of the zone, you're in luck thanks to them.

The Exploratorium, after all, has been expanding the audience for eclipses and the like with live video since 1998, and this time is no exception.

"We sent a production crew thousands of miles by plane and by boat to the coral island of Woleai, in the Pacific Ocean 500 miles north of New Guinea," the Exploratorium explains on their dedicated site. The journey was even documented on their blog.

From four telescopes, follow along above as the moon blocks out the sun for what NASA tells us will be about four (or fewer) glorious minutes. There's more, too, as a partial eclipse in areas along the "path of totality" will be visible for more than an hour before and after the main event. So make sure to start watching before it starts at 5:00 p.m. PST and expect the show to go on until 6:15 p.m. In fact, the telescope feed starts at 4 p.m. and goes to 7.

And for those who snoozed through astronomy class, check out this NASA eclipse explainer below.

"The coolness factor is off scale high," Exploratorium staff scientist Paul Doherty, Ph.D. tells ABC7. "I've seen 10 solar eclipses and they still thrill me to death."

Last, if you're near Exploratorium HQ, swing by for free after 5 p.m., and you can watch and learn from Exploratorium staff — the whole program is here.

Point of information: The phrase "once in a blue moon" should convey something that happens not that often, but also often enough that it's not ultra-rare, like a blue moon, which is most commonly defined as the second full moon to fall in a calendar month. We're having our first blue moon since 2012 tonight, and the next one won't be until January 2018, so all across the internet people are defining the above idiom for anyone left on earth who doesn't know — even though the actual etymology is a little more complicated.

And no, the moon won't be blue. As ABC News, KRON 4, and The Guardian all tell us, the moon only ever takes on a visibly blueish tinge when a volcanic eruption or large forest fire has sent ash into the atmosphere.

So, the phrase "once in a blue moon" can be a misnomer when used simply to mean "very rarely," as it often is, because blue moons as defined above do occur about every 32 months — with the moon's orbit lasting 29.5 days and months being 30-31 days long, this stands to reason.

But here's where the history of the idiom gets tricky: Defining "blue moon" as the second moon in a calendar month appears to date back to 1946 when amateur astronomer James Hugh Pruett defined it as such in an issue of Sky & Telescope magazine. Prior to that, there was a different definition altogether, traceable to the Maine Farmers' Almanac sometime after 1800, that also relates to the discrepancy in the lunar cycle and calendar year that allows for 13 full moons in a year every couple of years. The Almanac defined a blue moon as the third full moon in a season in which there are four — and this was not to be confused with the Native American-derived names for the monthly full moons such as the Pink Moon (April), the Buck Moon (July), and the Harvest Moon (October).

The first use of the term "blue moon" to refer something very rare actually dates back much further than that, to 1528 according to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins. And that meaning could, indeed, refer to seeing a moon that appears blue which is as rare as major volcanic eruptions are.

And, if you put any stock in astrology, you should know that this blue moon is in Aquarius, and it's "unprecedented" for other reasons, according to Elephant Journal.

The energies of this moon are only being magnified by Venus turning retrograde on the 25th, which is just one of seven planets slowing and turning retrograde the week prior to this lunar event.

This cosmic event is unprecedented — it’s truly a month of transitions.

Because of Venus, the planet of love, going retrograde a week prior to this moon, there will be a heavy connection to romantic relationships. This isn’t about just any sort of love though — it’s about the kind of love that comes around only once in a blue moon.

I hope everyone falls in love tonight. The end.

Remember all the supermoons last summer? The astronomical event of this evening will be a phenomenon sometimes called a "black supermoon," and it's the cause of a coastal flood advisory for the Bay Area until Thursday. The takeaway: the moon will basically disappear and the stars will be out and about. What does it mean? Your horoscopes in the comments.

For lunar novices, a supermoon is the coincidence of a full moon or a new moon (in this case, a new moon) with the closest approach it makes to Earth on its elliptical orbit. It's also called a "perigee moon." The moon, which is usually about 238,000 miles from Earth, will tonight be approximately 12,000 miles closer to our planet.

Of course we won't be able to see the supermoon's occurrence during the day, and since it's a new moon, we won't see it at night, either. In fact, it'll get out of the way almost completely, making for —as Universe Today puts it — "a prime time to go deep for faint objects while the light polluting Moon is safely out of the sky." So go on a starlit hike, because the black supermoon won’t be back — or seemingly gone — until October, 2016.

Down on Earth, though, the proximity of the moon will have a serious effect on tides. Per the previously mentioned advisory, "The sun... moon... and earth are in proper alignment to bring the largest tidal cycle of the season which will occur over the next few days. These excessive tides are often referred to as King Tides or Perigean Spring Tides and will result in minor coastal flooding of low-lying areas along the coast and bay fronts during periods of high tide."

This guy, for example, was a recent victim of these extra high tides around the Bay.

Related: Extra Warm Weather And Extra High Tides Arriving This Week
Summer Of Supermoons Starts Saturday

Have you heard about this lunar eclipse that's happening tonight? It's freaking some people out. But everyone just needs to calm down and pretend they have totally rational minds and we'll all get through this.

The somewhat unusual astronomical event, a tetrad, in which we will see four complete lunar eclipses over the next two years, occurring approximately every six months, has united both batshit Christians and respected astrologers in a collective panic. Also, it's going to be pretty, and we're lucky on the West Coast that tonight's will begin while most of us are still awake, with the moon starting to redden (from the sun's light refracting around the earth's atmosphere) around 10:30 p.m. PT, and the total eclipse happening right around 12:47 a.m. (But high clouds tonight are likely to ruin this for everyone in the Bay Area.)

Evangelical Texas preacher John Hagee, best known for telling New Orleans that Hurricane Katrina was revenge for the gay fest known as Southern Decadence, has leapt on the blood moon craze faster than Harold Camping could recant a prophecy, notes that previous tetrad years, 1948 and 1967, have meant huge events for the Holy Land -- statehood for Israel, and the Six-Day War, respectively. And he notes a passage from the Bible that talks about the moon turning red and the End of Days, and blah blah.

Astrologer to the stars Susan Miller, who runs the popular and free Astrology Zone site, has been talking up this April 15 eclipse for months, comparing it to moments like the American Revolution and saying that we all have to pay close attention to our money, and to financial relationships, because that's what this eclipse will all be about. She previously warned that if you have not filed your taxes, this is absolutely the wrong year to have waited til the last minute, and you'd better just file an extension.

Financial developments seem to reach culmination on the full moon lunar eclipse, April 15. I know - April 15 is tax day in the United States. The universe doesn't know about our special days, so it sends a total eclipse of the moon when it wants to do so. This eclipse brings Mars, Pluto, Uranus, and Jupiter in a perfect cross pattern, and that is tense. It's unusual to see all these planets line up within a degree or two in each of the highly energetic cardinal signs, each precisely 90 degrees from the other, with four squares and two oppositions. This is as tense as it gets. Mars will oppose Mercury too, and that is very jarring as well.

The ever classy USA Today went with the headline "Is Tuesday's 'blood moon' eclipse the end of the world?", and unfortunately, Hagee has gotten a lot of traction for his apocalyptical ranting.

More science-minded people note that these events are pretty regular in the astronomical sense, and there are going to be 8 more tetrads this century. Maybe the only unusual part about this upcoming tetrad is that all four eclipses are going to be visible from the United States, so that's cool. The next four blood moons will be on October 8, 2014; April 4, 2015; and September 28, 2015. The next tetrad won't occur until 2032.

[SF Gate]
[USA Today]
[Refinery 29]
[CNN]

SF Citizen's Jim Herd snapped this amazing shot of last night's Jupiter, Venus, and moon sighting from Golden Gate Park. This planets were visible from all around the world last night. Did you catch it? Hope so. Because it won't be happening again until 2052.

Check out more shots of the spectacular scene.