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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)

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.

In about 5 billion years from now, our sun, the closest star from earth, will end its life. Right now, it’s on 1/3 of its life expectancy. If we were to put the birth of our sun at 6a.m, and its death at 6p.m, we would now be at 11.30a.m. We get up every morning and experience the wonderful light from our sun. We take our medium sized star for granted and usually don’t take the time to think about its importance.
Our sun is created about 4.5 billion years ago. That’s also about the time earth is created.

I even took the time to draw this
As you can see, human history is just very recent compared to the earth’s age. The approximation is about 20k years ago when human first started to appear on earth. How did human appear? The so called evolution theory says humans evolved from apes. Well, for muslims, we should know better.
Earth is very very old. Human history is only few thousand years, which is really nothing compared to figures such as 5 billion years. It’s really just like a blink of an eye. Let’s say that earth is 1 minute. That means human history is just under 1 second. That’s not very long!
Anyway, that’s the story about our sun. But with recent global warming and greenhouse effect, I would say human race will long gone before the sun dies out. I really don’t know for sure, anything can happen. There’s also this crazy science fiction theory of colonizing to a different planet to save the human race. We will talk about that in a later post.