Blue moons, and all that

July was a rotten month, with both atmosphere and ocean conspiring to make things tough on the Commonwealth. The bad luck radiated to distant areas, too, and just when I thought I’d get out the month unscathed I wound up stranded in the desert when my pickup truck broke down. As I nervously eyeball the calendar, I note that this accursed month is still not safely gone. I guess we’re going to have to scrape it off the bottom of our shoe.

And even then, July will get the last laugh, since this it’s one of those “blue moon” months (as in “once in a blue moon”) that has two full moons falling within it. So the moon itself will be mocking us when August finally breaks the siege. Well, since Earth has skunked us, I’m going to heed that blue moon and ponder what the heavens have to offer.

And, on this note, July wasn’t so bad.

Given Saipan’s data and communications woes, you can be forgiven for missing a big news event, namely a space mission that coughed up all sorts of juicy information about the mysterious planet Pluto.

The solar system is a mighty weird place to begin with, but Pluto is positively Gonzo. It’s the outlier of the bunch, standing, on average, about 40 times as far from the sun as Earth does, and its orbit falls outside of the plane in which all the other planets are working and playing together. Speaking of orbit, it takes Pluto 248 Earth years to orbit the sun.

Even Pluto’s status as a “planet” has fallen into contention, or even disrepute. It’s often called a “dwarf planet” these days. You can call it whatever you want; it won’t bother me any. Planet, for me, is just easier to say, so I’ll consider it in the broad term of a planet-like object and we’ll leave it at that.

Anyway, whatever you call it, NASA just got a solid look-see at it via the New Horizons space probe, which, in mid-July, started sending back photos of Pluto’s surface. I caught snippets of various radio interviews with scientists, who were excited that the mountains and other features of Pluto appeared to show evidence that Pluto is geologically active.

The photos are cool, so, when Saipan’s fiber-optic cable is repaired and full Internet service is restored, you’ve got something interesting to look up.

Although Pluto is, under the right conditions, said to be visible through a decent-sized amateur telescope, I’ll confess that I’ve never bothered to hunt for it.

About a week after the Pluto photos started to hit the scene, NASA had more big news to unveil: The Kepler space telescope has discovered what may be a very Earth-like planet out there, and by “out there” I mean outside of our solar system. These planets are called exoplanets. This particular exoplanet is called Kepler 352-b, and the star it orbits is called Kepler 352.

Unlike Pluto, Kepler 352-b isn’t something we’ll ever get up-close photos of. It’s 1,400 light-years away, meaning over eight-thousand-trillion miles. Remember the New Horizons space probe, the one that just photographed Pluto? It took a bit over nine years to make that trip. But it would take 26 million years to make it the distance to Kepler 352-b.

Here’s the current tally for exoplanets: There are 1,879 confirmed and 4,696 “Kepler candidates.” The last time I heard an astronomer talking about it, he said that the ratio of planets to stars seems roughly in the neighborhood of 2:1 or 1:1. So there are probably a whole lot of planets out there.

As for our situation, well, our solar system is based on a fairly typical star that lives within a fairly typical galaxy. And to add to the mundane context, our sun is middle-aged and it lives in the suburbs, neatly between the edge and the middle of our galaxy.

So: Is life is, or is life ain’t, something unique to Earth? Well, that’s your call. I’ll stay out of it.

While I’m staying out of that, I’m hoping to get out of July without any more minor disasters. Sure, there are only a few hours left to count down, but I’m not taking anything for granted.