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If skies are clear Saturday, go out at sunset and look for the giant moon rising in the east. It will be the biggest and brightest one of 2009, sure to wow even seasoned observers.

Earth, the moon and the sun are all bound together by gravity, which keeps us going around the sun and keeps the moon going around us as it goes through phases. The moon makes a trip around Earth every 29.5 days.

But the orbit is not a perfect circle. One portion is about 31,000 miles (50,000 km) closer to our planet than the farthest part, so the moon’s apparent size in the sky changes. Saturday night the moon will be at perigee, the closest point to us on this orbit.

It will appear about 14 percent bigger in our sky and 30 percent brighter than some other full moons during 2009, according to NASA. (A similar setup occurred in December, making that month’s full moon the largest of 2008.)

Remember, its this Saturday! Make sure to look at the moon! (Article from space.com)

Have you ever wondered what happens to your online accounts after you die(deceased)? Here are some of the solutions to that.

1. E-Mail

Hotmail lets relatives order a CD of all the messages in a deceased user’s account if they provide a death certificate and proof of power of attorney. Gmail requires the same paperwork plus a copy of an e-mail the deceased sent to the petitioner.

2.Social Networking

Facebook will follow a family’s wishes to take down a deceased user’s profile or keep it in a “memorial state,” which removes features like status updates and lets only confirmed friends view the profile and post comments on it.

3.Photo-Sharing

Photo-storage site Flickr will keep an account up and mostly open to the public, but if a user had marked any photos as private, the site won’t let family or friends into the account to access them.

4.Passwords

Several companies, like Legacy Locker, offer encrypted space to store passwords and other account information to give to designated recipients after a user dies. Each site has a system in place to verify a user’s death before distributing any digital assets.

(article from http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1920427,00.html)

An unusual celestial vanishing act will take place the night of Sept. 2 when all four of Jupiter’s largest moons will be hidden from our view.

The event will occur on a night when Jupiter happens to be positioned very close to Earth’s moon in the southeastern sky. The two objects, though very far apart in space, will be about 5 degrees from each other in our sky (your fist on an outstretched arm covers about 10 degrees of sky). This pairing makes Jupiter, which outshines all stars and so is easy to spot, even easier for anyone to locate.

Anyone who points a small telescope at Jupiter will nearly always see some or all of the four well-known Galilean satellites. Usually at least two or three of these moons, and sometimes all four, are immediately evident as small star-like points of light.

From space.com. A rare occurrence. It may not bring any impact to us, but if ure interested you can even see it with the naked eye, subjected to the condition of the sky of course, no cloud blocking the view.