'Beautiful Phenomenon' to Appear Christmas Morning Over Lake Elsinore, Wildomar: Astronomer

By City News Service:

If the skies aren’t clouded over, a lunar rarity will be visible before dawn on Christmas, a UC Riverside astronomer said Tuesday.

“Although it is not of astronomical significance, it is still a beautiful phenomenon,” UCR researcher Mario De Leo Winkler told City News Service. “This will be the first Christmas morning that will be paired with a full moon since 1977.”

Winkler said the moon will reach full phase at 3:11 a.m. local time on Friday. The next full moon on Christmas won’t occur until 2034.

According to Winkler, who oversees a NASA-sponsored program in the UCR Department of Physics and Astronomy, the moon will appear on the eastern horizon at sunset on Christmas Eve, reaching its highest point in the southern sky about midnight.

The silver orb may be shrouded by late evening, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasters are predicting that a frontal boundary is going to sweep over the area Thursday night, dragging in a fetch of moisture expected to produce rain showers throughout the Inland Empire into Christmas morning.

Winkler noted that the moon won’t be the only celestial stimulation coinciding with Christmas.

“On Christmas Eve, a giant asteroid will be zooming past Earth,” he said. “The oddly named 2004-SD220 will zoom by at a distance of 6.8 million miles. That is 27 times farther away than the distance from the Earth to the moon. The asteroid is 1.3 miles in diameter -- or 20 football fields -- and is moving through space at 17 miles per second.”

The astronomer reassured that the solid mass “poses no risk to the planet -- there is no chance it collides with Earth in any way.”

“We won’t see 2004-SD220 again until the year 2018,” Winkler said.

Additional information on space activity is available here: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/ .

(Image courtesy of NASA)