Mon May 12, 2025 FULL MOON OF MAY
The moon is full tonight. May’s full moon is the Planting Moon of springtime, also the Milk Moon, the Hare Moon or the Frogs Return Moon. Since it’s May we also call it the Merry Moon. Here in America the Creek and the Seminole Indians call this the Mulberry Moon. The Cheyenne say it is the Moon When the Horses Get Fat, but to the Sioux, it’s the Moon When the Ponies Shed. Other Native American tribes have similar names that suggest the tending of crops, and the beginning of warm weather. To the Winnebago peoples, this is the Hoeing Corn Moon; To the Salish, it is the Flower Moon, but the Osage tribes call it the Moon When the Little Flowers Die.
Tue May 13, 2025 THE MOON AND THE HORSESHOE CRAB
In the springtime, usually in the month of May when the moon is new or full, and the Atlantic Ocean tide is high, horseshoe crabs mate and lay their eggs in the sand at the water's edge. Not a true crab at all, but a distant relative of spiders and scorpions, the horseshoe crab is often called a living fossil because its kind has existed unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Far above, the moon shines down upon them from a distance of a quarter of a million miles. Horseshoe crabs can hardly see the moon, lacking proper eyesight for the task, but they are nevertheless driven to perform their mating ritual according to a very ancient tradition, following the rhythm of the lunar spring tides of May.
Wed May 14, 2025 GENERAL RELATIVITY DAY
On May 11th, 1916, Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was announced. It supplemented his earlier work on "special relativity", which stated that light travels at the same speed, whether you are moving toward the source of the light, or away from it. With general relativity, Einstein suggested that space itself is curved, the amount of curvature depending on the gravity fields of massive objects like stars and galaxies. Planets don't follow orbits because the sun is pulling on them; rather, they revolve because the sun's mass makes a big dent in the fabric of space-time, and the planets travel like marbles rolling on the inside of a funnel. Our sun’s gravity field is so great that the positions of distant stars are shifted by it. It's all pretty deep.
Thu May 15, 2025 HOWLING COYOTE
An old Navajo story tells how the stars came to be. Altse’ Hastiin, the first man, asked all the animals to gather up the bright shining stones along the river. They carried those stones up into the sky where they became stars. They put them in patterns which would show the people which creatures had set those stars in place. Now the small animals could not carry many stars and Great Spirit asked Coyote to take a bag of stones to help them complete their pictures. But Coyote soon grew tired, and he flung the stones across the sky, scattering them, and making a jumble of the pictures. Then Coyote was sorry, because he had forgotten to put his own picture up in the heavens. And that, say the Navajo, is why the Coyote howls at night.
Fri May 16, 2025 THE SUN AND THE SOLAR YEAR
Over the course of a year, the sun drifts eastward against the background of stars. It’s a very slow motion caused not by earth’s rotation, but by its revolution about the sun, which displaces the sun’s position by about 1 degree of angle a day – that’s less than the width of your little finger at arm’s length! After roughly 365 days, the sun returns to where it had been exactly a year ago. This weekend the sun appears below the Pleiades star cluster in the constellation Taurus. Next month it will be in Gemini, the month after that in Cancer, then Leo, and so on until next May 17th, when it will be alongside the Pleiades again. This defines the solar year as the amount of time needed for the sun to go full circle, once around the zodiac in the heavens.
