Earth Hour

Earth Hour is an annual event to promote reduced energy consumption for the planet Earth by turning off non-essential lights for one hour from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. on the last Saturday in March. It was first organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) as a lights-off event in Sydney, Australia in 2007. Since then, 7,000 cities, 1,200 landmarks and 172 countries and territories have joined the action to raise the awareness of climate change.

Postcard US-1630412 to the Netherlands shows New York-New York Hotel & Casino before and during Earth Hour in Las Vegas on March 26, 2011. It features a quote from a Senegalese forestry engineer Baba Dioum: "In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught." Sent before and received on Earth Day, April 22, 2012, it also highlighted the theme for Earth Day 2012: Mobilize the Earth.

For Earth Hour 2015 on Saturday, March 28, Las Vegas City Hall and the properties from MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, and Boyd Gaming all dimmed their exterior lighting, signage and marquees from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. In addition to dimming the lights, Venetian and Palazzo had put on a candlelight display at Doge's Palace Plaza in front of Venetian.

Candlelight display for Earth Hour 2015 at Venetian with Mirage dimming its lights in the background.

Earth Hour 2016 will be on Saturday, March 26, from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. local time.

Daylight Saving Time Starts in 2015, But Not in Hawaii

Daylight Saving Time (DST) starts today at 2 a.m. on March 8, 2015 in most parts of the U.S. except in the states of Arizona and Hawaii, and the overseas territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the United States Virgin Islands. As clocks "spring forward" one hour, spring is in the air.

Hawaii is in the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone; Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (HST) is equivalent to GMT/UTC - 10h Standard Time. When the United States enacted the Uniform Time Act in 1966, Hawaii opted out in 1967, mainly because there is not a large variation in daylight hours from summer to winter due to Hawaii's proximity to the Equator. The Territorial Legislature enacted a bill placing Hawaii on daylight saving time in 1933, but the law was repealed three weeks later. According to Wikepedia, during World War II between February 9, 1942 and September 30, 1945, Hawaiian Standard Time was advanced one hour to so-called "Hawaiian War Time." That was the only period when Hawaii was effectively placed on year-round daylight saving time.

Postcard US-3230216 from California shows a NASA image of the entire Hawaiian Island chain as seen from the Space Shuttle. Niihau and Kauai are in the foreground followed by Oahu, Molokai, Lanai and Maui, with the Big island in the distance. The curve of the Earth and the black of outer space can be seen on the top of the card.

If Comet Has a Choice

Comet is in the news as the European Space Agency's spacecraft made a first ever soft landing on a comet after a 10-year, 310-million-mile or 500-million-kilometer journey. However, the mission may have ended early as the spacecraft apparently bounced and landed in a shadow and could not get enough charge to its batteries from solar panels.

A comet is basically a big dirty snow ball that circles the Sun. When getting close to the Sun, it gets heated up and begins to emit gas and particles from its nucleus, forming a visible atmosphere, and sometimes a tail upon the effects of solar radiation and solar wind.

Comets become extinct when they have lost all of their volatile ices and particles as a result of having passed too close to the Sun, or having passed close to the Sun too many times. So, I am wondering if a comet has a choice, will she choose to stay away from the Sun and live as a dirty snow ball eternally, or to get close to the Sun and reveal herself in splendid once and for all?

Postcard US-2107408 to Russia was made from a photo I collected when I was in graduate school. Google Image Search turns up several additional photos at Sunet.SE's ftp site. It looks like to be Comet Hale–Bopp that had its closest approach to Earth on March 22, 1997.

Earth Observation from Space

Fifty five years ago, the U.S. satellite Explorer VI was launched by a Thor DM-18 Able III rocket from Cape Canaveral's LC-17A site in Florida on August 7, 1959.  It took the first black-and-white photo of the planet Earth from space, showing a portion of the ocean and the cloud cover over the Central Pacific Ocean. It started an era of the earth observation from space.

Postcard US-1893434 to Russia was one of the six limited edition IKONOS Collector cards from Space Imaging 2003 International Image Festival. It shows the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on the northern bank of the Moskva River, a few blocks southwest of the Kremlin, in Moscow, Russia. By comparing the image card with the recent satellite image from the same area on Google Maps, you can find out those changes in the area over the past 10 years.

Blood Moon in Sky

Postcard US-1651277 to Russia shows various nightlife in Florida under a "blood moon".

In the early morning of April 15, 2014 when a total lunar eclipse occurred, the "blood moon" was visible from most of North and South America, Hawaii and parts of Alaska. A total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon, the earth, and the sun are in alignment. As a result, the moon is completely covered by the Earth’s shadow. The following photo shows the total eclipse of the moon underway over Las Vegas, Nevada as seen from West Sahara Avenue and South Valley View Boulevard around 12:40 am on April 15, 2014. The bright star on the lower-right corner is Spica from the constellation Virgo, the 15th brightest star in the sky.

The eclipse was the first of four consecutive total lunar eclipses, known as a tetrad, on April, 15, 2014, October 8, 2014, April 4, 2015, and September 28 2015.

NASA's Earth Observing System in 41 Years

Useful Pursuit of Shadows

Fourty one years ago on July 23, 1972, Landsat 1, the first satellite of the NASA's Earth Observing program, was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Modified from the Nimbus 4 meteorological satellite, the near-polar orbiting satellite had been used as a stabilized, Earth-oriented platform for obtaining ground information for agricultural and forestry resources inventory, geologic survey and cartography, mineral resources exploration, hydrology and water resources studies, and environmental monitoring.

NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) has since grown into a coordinated series of polar-orbiting and low inclination satellites for long-term global observations of the land surface, biosphere, solid Earth, atmosphere, and oceans. Its current fleet includes Landsat 7, Landsat 8 and CloutSat.

Image by Jenny Mottar, NASA Headquarters

The postcard shows a painting, titled "Useful Pursuit of Shadows" by Graeme Stephens in 2003, that illustrates the CloudSat taking 3D radar images of clouds from Earth orbit. CloudSat was launched in April 2006 to measure how much liquid water and ice are in the clouds, at what altitudes, and how the clouds to reflect and absorb the Sun's energy.

CloudSat is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA 91109. However, a Google search would turn up its address as: La Cañada Flintridge, CA 91011. A blog of LA Times explained why.

Supermoon

Full Moon at Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas

The expired postcard US-1895485 was sent to Netherlands on October 2, 2012. It shows a full moon over the Flamingo Hotel on September 30, 2012.

On Sunday, June 23, 2013 at 4:32 am PDT (11:32 UTC / 7:32 am EDT), the moon was at its perigee point, the point in the moon orbit that is closest to the center of the earth. Whenever that happens as the moon also enters its fullest phase, it creates a coincidence called "supermoon". At its fullest and closest, the moon appears about 12% larger in the sky.

In the middle of the picture shows the supermoon in the evening of June 22, 2013 while on the right shows a full moon on September 30, 2012. The difference between the two is shown on the left.

The previous two supermoons happened on March 19, 2011 and on May 6, 2012. The next superMoon will be on August 10, 2014. 

I wish I were in Alaska so that I could see the supermoon in the midnight sun. You can see photos of the supermoon at Huffington Post, Baltimore Sun, EarthSky.ORG and Space.COM.

Love and Green for Earth Day

April 22nd

Let's mark the Earth Day with some love and green. This postcard was a private swap. It reads: Love means your heart is the end of the World as I couldn't go any further. Born with the color of cactus green, you are a  hard worker full of determination. I happened to find this song on Youtube; I think it's sweet.

There is actually an "Earth" in Texas, a small town with population of 1,109 people as of the 2000 Census. It even has a post office!

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