Facts About MOON

1) There's actually four kinds of lunar months

Our months correspond approximately to the length of time it takes our natural satellite to go through a full cycle of phases.  From excavated tally sticks, researchers have deduced that people from as early as the Paleolithic period counted days in relation to the moon's phases. But there are actually four different kinds of lunar months.  The durations listed here are averages.

1.     Anomalistic – the length of time it takes the moon to circle the Earth, measured from one perigee (the closest point in its orbit to Earth) to the next: 27 days, 13 hours, 18 minutes, 37.4 seconds.

2.     Nodical – the length of time it takes the moon to pass through one of its nodes (where it crosses the plane of the Earth's orbit) and return to it: 27 days, 5 hours, 5 minutes, 35.9 seconds.

3.     Sidereal – the length of time it takes the moon to circle the Earth, using the stars as a reference point: 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes, 11.5 seconds.

4.     Synodical – the length of time it takes the moon to circle the Earth, using the sun as the reference point (that is, the time lapse between two successive conjunctions with the sun – going from new moon to new moon): 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2.7 seconds.  It is the synodic month that is the basis of many calendars today and is used to divide the year.

2) We see slightly more than half of the moon from Earth

Most reference books will note that because the moon rotates only once during each revolution about the Earth, we never see more than half of its total surface. The truth, however, is that we actually get to see more of it over the course of its elliptical orbit: 59 percent (almost three-fifths). ['Supermoon' Full Moons Explained]

The moon's rate of rotation is uniform but its rate of revolution is not, so we're able to see just around the edge of each limb from time to time.  Put another way, the two motions do not keep perfectly in step, even though they come out together at the end of the month. We call this effect libration of longitude.

So the moon "rocks" in the east and west direction, allowing us to see farther around in longitude at each edge than we otherwise could. The remaining 41 percent can never be seen from our vantage point; and if anyone were on that region of the moon, they would never see the Earth.

3) It would take hundreds of thousands of moons to equal the brightness of the sun

The full moon shines with a magnitude of -12.7, but the sun is 14 magnitudes brighter, at -26.7.  The ratio of brightness of the sun versus the moon amounts to a difference of 398,110 to 1.  So that's how many full moons you would need to equal the brightness of the sun.  But this all a moot point, because there is no way that you could fit that many full moons in the sky.

The sky is 360 degrees around (including the half we can't see, below the horizon), so there are over 41,200 square degrees in the sky. The moon measures only a half degree across, which gives it an area of only 0.2 square degrees. So you could fill up the entire sky, including the half that lies below our feet,  with 206,264 full moons — and still come up short by 191,836 in the effort to match the brightness of the sun.

4) The first- or last-quarter moon is not one half as bright as a full moon

If the moon's surface were like a perfectly smooth billiard ball, its surface brightness would be the same all over. In such a case, it would indeed appear half as bright.[Phases of the Moon Explained]

But the moon has a very rough topography. Especially near and along the day/night line (known as the terminator), the lunar landscape appears riddled with innumerable shadows cast by mountains, boulders and even tiny grains of lunar dust.  Also, the moon's face is splotched with dark regions.  The end result is that at first quarter, the moon appears only one eleventh as bright as when it's full. 

The moon is actually a little brighter at first quarter than at last quarter, since at that phase some parts of the moon reflect sunlight better than others.

5) A 95-percent illuminated moon appears half as bright as a full moon

Believe it or not, the moon is half as bright as a full moon about 2.4 days before and after a full moon.  Even though about 95 percent of the moon is illuminated at this time, and to most casual observers it might still look like a "full" moon, its brightness is roughly 0.7 magnitudes less than at full phase, making it appear one-half as bright.

6) The Earth, seen from the moon, also goes through phases

However, they are opposite to the lunar phases that we see from the Earth. It's a full Earth when it's new moon for us; last-quarter Earth when we're seeing a first-quarter moon; a crescent Earth when we're seeing a gibbous moon, and when the Earth is at new phase we're seeing a full moon. 

From any spot on the moon (except on the far side, where you cannot see the Earth), the Earth would always be in the same place in the sky.

From the moon, our Earth appears nearly four times larger than a full moon appears to us, and – depending on the state of our atmosphere – shines anywhere from 45 to 100 times brighter than a full moon.  So when a full (or nearly full) Earth appears in the lunar sky, it illuminates the surrounding lunar landscape with a bluish-gray glow.  

From here on the Earth, we can see that glow when the moon appears to us as a crescent; sunlight illuminates but a sliver of the moon, while the rest of its outline is dimly visible by virtue of earthlight.  Leonardo da Vinci was the first to figure out what that eerie glow appearing on the moon really was.

7) Eclipses are reversed when viewing from the moon

Phases aren't the only things that are seen in reverse from the moon.  An eclipse of the moon for us is an eclipse of the sun from the moon.  In this case, the disk of the Earth appears to block out the sun. 

If it completely blocks the sun, a narrow ring of light surrounds the dark disk of the Earth; our atmosphere back lighted by the sun.  The ring appears to have a ruddy hue, since it's the combined light of all the sunrises and sunsets occurring at that particular moment.  That's why during a total lunar eclipse, the moon takes on a ruddy or coppery glow. 

When a total eclipse of the sun is taking place here on Earth, an observer on the moon can watch over the course of two or three hours as a small, distinct patch of darkness works its way slowly across the surface of the Earth.  It's the moon's dark shadow, called the umbra, that falls on the Earth, but unlike in a lunar eclipse, where the moon can be completely engulfed by the Earth's shadow, the moon's shadow is less than a couple of hundred miles wide when it touches the Earth, appearing only as a dark blotch.

8) There are rules for how the moon's craters are named

The lunar craters were formed by asteroids and comets that collided with the moon.  Roughly 300,000 craters wider than 1 km (0.6 miles) are thought to be on the moon's near side alone. 

These are named for scholars, scientists, artists and explorers.  For example, Copernicus Crater is named for Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer who realized in the 1500s that the planets move about the sun. Archimedes Crater is named for the Greek mathematician Archimedes, who made many mathematical discoveries in the third century B.C.

The custom of applying personal names to the lunar formations began in 1645 with Michael van Langren, an engineer in Brussels who named the moon's principal features after kings and great people on the Earth.  On his lunar map he named the largest lunar plain (now known as Oceanus Procellarum) after his patron, Phillip IV of Spain. 

But just six years later, Giovanni Battista Riccioli of Bologna completed his own great lunar map, which removed the names bestowed by Van Langren and instead derived names chiefly from those of famous astronomers — the basis of the system which continues to this day.  In 1939, the British Astronomical Association issued a catalog of officially named lunar formations, "Who's Who on the Moon," listing the names of all formations adopted by the International Astronomical Union.

Today the IAU continues to decide the names for craters on our moon, along with names for all astronomical objects.  The IAU organizes the naming of each particular celestial feature around a particular theme. 

The names of craters now tend to fall into two groups. Typically, moon craters have been named for deceased scientists, scholars, explorers, and artists who've become known for their contributions to their respective fields.  The craters around the Apollo crater and the Mare Moscoviense are to be named after deceased American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts.

9) The moon encompasses a huge temperature range

If you survey the Internet for temperature data on the moon, you're going to run into quite a bit of confusion. There's little consistency even within a given website in which temperature scale is quoted: Celsius, Fahrenheit, even Kelvin. 

We have opted to use the figures that are quoted by NASA on its Website: The temperature at the lunar equator ranges from an extremely low minus 280 degrees F (minus 173 degrees C) at night to a very high 260 degrees F (127 degrees C) in the daytime. In some deep craters near the moon's poles, the temperature is always near minus 400 degrees F (minus 240 degrees C).

During a lunar eclipse, as the moon moves into the Earth's shadow, the surface temperature can plunge about 500 degrees F (300 degrees C) in less than 90 minutes.  

10) The moon has its own time zone

It is possible to tell time on the moon.  In fact, back in 1970, Helbros Watches asked Kenneth L. Franklin, who for many years was the chief astronomer at New York's Hayden Planetarium, to design a watch for moon walkers that measures time in what he called "lunations," the period it takes the moon to rotate and revolve around the Earth; each lunation is exactly 29.530589 Earth days.

For the moon, Franklin developed a system he called "lunar mean solar time," or Lunar Time (LT).   He envisioned local lunar time zones similar to the standard time zones of Earth, but based on meridians that are 12-degrees wide (analogous to the 15-degree intervals on Earth).  "They will be named unambiguously as '36-degree East Zone time,' etc., although 'Copernican time,' 'West Tranquillity time' and others may be adopted as convenient."   A lunar hour was defined as a "lunour," and decilunours, centilunours and millilunours were also introduced.  

Interestingly, one moon watch was sent to the president of the United States at the time, Richard M. Nixon, who sent a thank you note to Franklin. The note and another moon watch were kept in a display case at the Hayden Planetarium for several years. 

Quite a few visitors would openly wonder why Nixon was presented with a wristwatch that could be used only on the moon.     

Forty years have come and gone without the watch becoming a big seller. 

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, N.Y.

                                                      Todays Fact About The Brain

The human brain is the most complex and least understood part of the human anatomy. There may be a lot we don’t know, but here are a few interesting facts that we’ve got covered.

1. Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles per hour. Ever wonder how you can react so fast to things around you or why that stubbed toe hurts right away? It’s due to the super-speedy movement of nerve impulses from your brain to the rest of your body and vice versa, bringing reactions at the speed of a high powered luxury sports car.
2. The brain operates on the same amount of power as 10-watt light bulb. The cartoon image of a light bulb over your head when a great thought occurs isn’t too far off the mark. Your brain generates as much energy as a small light bulb even when you’re sleeping.
3. The human brain cell can hold 5 times as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or any other encyclopedia for that matter. Scientists have yet to settle on a definitive amount, but the storage capacity of the brain in electronic terms is thought to be between 3 or even 1,000 terabytes. The National Archives of Britain, containing over 900 years of history, only takes up 70 terabytes, making your brain’s memory power pretty darn impressive.
4. Your brain uses 20% of the oxygen that enters your bloodstream. The brain only makes up about 2% of our body mass, yet consumes more oxygen than any other organ in the body, making it extremely susceptible to damage related to oxygen deprivation. So breathe deep to keep your brain happy and swimming in oxygenated cells.
5. The brain is much more active at night than during the day.Logically, you would think that all the moving around, complicated calculations and tasks and general interaction we do on a daily basis during our working hours would take a lot more brain power than, say, lying in bed. Turns out, the opposite is true. When you turn off your brain turns on. Scientists don’t yet know why this is but you can thank the hard work of your brain while you sleep for all those pleasant dreams.
6. Scientists say the higher your I.Q. the more you dream. While this may be true, don’t take it as a sign you’re mentally lacking if you can’t recall your dreams. Most of us don’t remember many of our dreams and the average length of most dreams is only 2-3 seconds–barely long enough to register.
7. Neurons continue to grow throughout human life. For years scientists and doctors thought that brain and neural tissue couldn’t grow or regenerate. While it doesn’t act in the same manner as tissues in many other parts of the body, neurons can and do grow throughout your life, adding a whole new dimension to the study of the brain and the illnesses that affect it.
8. Information travels at different speeds within different types of neurons. Not all neurons are the same. There are a few different types within the body and transmission along these different kinds can be as slow as 0.5 meters/sec or as fast as 120 meters/sec.
9. The brain itself cannot feel pain. While the brain might be the pain center when you cut your finger or burn yourself, the brain itself does not have pain receptors and cannot feel pain. That doesn’t mean your head can’t hurt. The brain is surrounded by loads of tissues, nerves and blood vessels that are plenty receptive to pain and can give you a pounding headache.
10. 80% of the brain is water. Your brain isn’t the firm, gray mass you’ve seen on TV. Living brain tissue is a squishy, pink and jelly-like organ thanks to the loads of blood and high water content of the tissue. So the next time you’re feeling dehydrated get a drink to keep your brain hydrated.

TODAYS  Facts          TODAYS FACT : Dream In Our Dreams We Only See Faces That We already Know Our mind is not inventing faces – in our dreams we see real faces of real people that we have seen during our life but may not know or remember. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces throughout our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams. Dreaming can help you learn. If you’re studying for a test or trying to learn a new task, you might consider taking a nap or heading to bed early rather than hovering over a textbook an hour longer. Here’s why: When the brain dreams, it helps you learn and solve problems, say researchers at Harvard Medical School. In a study that appeared in a recent issue of Current Biology, researchers report that dreams are the brain’s way of processing, integrating and understanding new information. To improve the quality of your sleep—and your brain’s ability to learn—avoid noise in the bedroom, such as the TV, which may negatively impact the length and quality of dreams Just like men, women can have orgasms during dreams. Did you think only men experience this phenomenon? Not true, says Barbara Bartlik , MD, a psychiatrist and sex therapist in New York. Warning, further reading may produce blushing: “Women have orgasms during their sleep, just as men do,” she says. “These orgasms often accompany erotic dreams, but they also may occur during dreams of a non erotic nature.” When women dream, she says, it’s not uncommon for their genitals to become engorged and lubricated. “This occurs during REM sleep, which happens several times during the night,” she says. A similar thing happens to men. “Men get erections during REM sleep, whether or not the man is having an erotic dream.” The most common dream? Your spouse is cheating. If you’ve ever woken up in a cold sweat after dreaming about your husband’s extramarital escapade with your best friend, you’re not alone, says Lauri Quinn Loewenberg, a dream expert, author and media personality. “The most commonly reported dream is the one where your mate is cheating,” she says. Loewenberg conducted a survey of more than 5,000 people, and found that the infidelity dream is the nightmare that haunts most people—sometimes on a recurring basis. It rarely has anything to do with an actual affair, she explains, but rather the common and universal fear of being wronged or left alone. You can have several—even a dozen—dreams in one night. It’s not just one dream per night, but rather dozens of them, say experts—you just may not remember them all. “We dream every 90 minutes throughout the night, with each cycle of dreaming being longer than the previous,” explains Loewenberg. “The first dream of the night is about 5 minutes long and the last dream you have before awakening can be 45 minutes to an hour long.” It is estimated that most people have more than 100,000 dreams in a lifetime. You can linger in a dream after waking. Have you ever woken up from such a beautiful, perfect dream that you wished you could go back to sleep to soak it all up (you know, the dream about George Clooney?)? You can! Just lie still—don’t move a muscle—and you can remain in a semi-dreamlike state for a few minutes. “The best way to remember your dreams is to simply stay put when you wake up,” says Loewenberg. “Remain in the position you woke up in, because that is the position you were dreaming in. When you move your body, you disconnect yourself from the dream you were just in seconds ago.”  Even bizarre dreams can be interpreted.  While it can be hard to believe that an oddball dream about your mother, a circus and a snowstorm can have any bearing on real life, there may be symbolism and potential meaning to be mined in every dream—you just have to look for it, says Harvard-trained psychotherapist Jeffrey Sumber. "The meaning of our dreams oftentimes relates to things we are needing to understand about ourselves and the world around us,” he says. Instead of shrugging off strange dreams, think about how they make you feel. “We tend to dismiss these dreams due to the strange components, yet it is the feeling we have in these dreams that matters most,” he explains. “Sometimes the circus and the snowstorm are just fillers that allow us to process the range of emotions we feel about our mother and give us the necessary distraction so we can actually experience that spectrum of emotion.” Recurring dreams may be your mind’s way of telling you something.  Do you have the same nightmare over and over again? Loewenberg suggests looking for underlying messages in recurring dreams so that you can rid yourself of them. For example, a common recurring nightmare people have involves losing or cracking their teeth. For this dream, she recommends that people think about what your teeth and your mouth represent. “To the dreaming mind, your teeth, as well as any part of your mouth, are symbolic of your words,” she says. “Paying attention to your teeth dreams helps you to monitor and improve the way you communicate.” You can control your dreams.  The premise of the new movie Inception is that people can take the reins of their dreams and make them what they want them to be. But it may not just be a Hollywood fantasy. According to the results of a new survey of 3,000 people, dream control, or “lucid dreaming” may be a real thing. In fact, 64.9 percent of participants reported being aware they were dreaming within a dream, and 34 percent said they can sometimes control what happens in their dreams. Taking charge of the content of your dreams isn’t a skill everyone has, but it can be developed, says Kelly Bulkeley, PhD, a dream researcher and visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkley, California. The technique is particularly useful for people who suffer from recurring nightmares, he says. Dr. Bulkeley suggests giving yourself a pep talk of sorts before you go to sleep by saying: “If I have that dream again, I’m going to try to remember that’s it’s only a dream, and be aware of that.” When you learn to be aware that you are dreaming—within a dream—you not only have the power to steer yourself away from the monster and into the arms of Brad Pitt, for instance, but you train your mind to avoid nightmares in the first place. “Lucid dreaming enhances your ability to learn from the dream state,” says Dr. Bulkeley.

Jokes Of The day Ek conductor ki shadi ho rahi thi, jab Dulhn phero ke waqt uske pas akar baithi to vo bola thoda pas ho k baith, ek sawari or baith sakti hai.

 Bahut Kuch Ditta Eh Rabba Tu Mainu, Bass Ik  Meharbani Hor Karde

 Ja Tah Milaade Mainu Yaar Mere Naal, Nhi Tah  Botal Whisky Di Mere Moohre Dharde

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Teacher: Galti hone pe maafi magne wale ko kya kahte hai?
Stud: Samajhdar
Teacher: Aur galti na hone pe bhi mafi mangne waale ko kya kahte hai?
Stud: BOYFRIEND