Lunar Eavesdropping in Louisville

One from our blog Revelation Awaits an Appointed Time:


There's a great page on the Otter Creek-South Harrison Observatory website about Louisville resident Larry Baysinger, an amateur radio enthusiast who managed to tune in to Apollo 11's live radio feed in July 1969.

Louisville Courier-Journal writer Glenn Rutherford wrote an article about Baysinger's historic accomplishment in the July 23, 1969 issue. Rutherford's article is reprinted on the Observatory's website, and mp3 files of some of the best parts of the astronaut dialogue that Baysinger recorded are offered as well. Furthermore, the site documents the original 50s/60s source materials that Baysinger was working from to achieve his reception of NASA's signals, including pdf files of relevant parts of CQ magazine.


Skeptics who doubt that Baysinger really managed to pick up these signals with such relatively primitive equipment should take note that his recordings feature Aldrin and Armstrong's voices uninterrupted by the cross-talk from the PAO and others, as heard on all terrestrial recording sources of the same dialogue.

The Cumberland Moonbow

There are only a handful of places in the world where one can see a genuine moonbow - Victoria Falls, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, is one such place where moonbow fans flock to view the phenomenon. And Cumberland Falls, near Williamsburg, KY is another.

What is a moonbow? It's a rainbow produced by moonlight rather than sunlight. They're relatively faint compared to rainbows, and they're always in the opposite part of the sky from the moon. The human eye doesn't often clearly see vibrant colors in moonbows, but they're very evident when long-exposure photographs are taken.

I used to think a rainbowy ring of light around the moon was a moonbow. Technically speaking, it is not. That would be a corona, a light-diffraction phenomenon produced by clouds or mist. Moonbows tend to be 22-degree-angle halos, formed during very rare circumstances, most often near waterfalls but not necessarily.

(Photo above by flickr user Bryce Fields.)

Blue Moon

Random disassociated fragments, in search of glue:

1. Elvis Presley, in private moments filtered through his own internal gobo of pills and vodka, often stated that he felt as if he was not of this world.

2. The mysterious term "blue moon" is one whose origin is shrouded in antiquity, and has seemed to have had numerous meanings over time. The first recorded instance of the term was in British in the year 1528. Interestingly, the first recorded instance of the idea of moon being made of green cheese was one year later, in 1529.

3. According to some ancient myths, a blue moon is a rarely occurring magical event during which the moon's cratered face speaks.

4. The term "blue moon" is most commonly used metaphorically to describe a rare event, as in the saying "once in a blue moon".

5. Kentuckian Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, wrote "Blue Moon of Kentucky" in 1947.

5. According to Wikipedia: "Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but each calendar year contains those twelve full lunar cycles plus about eleven days to spare. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years there is an extra full moon (this happens every 2.72 years). Different definitions place the extra moon at different times - the extra moon is called a blue moon".

6. Many people call a full moon a blue moon if it was the second of two full moons to occur in the same calendar month. However, this definition of "blue moon" originated from a mistake in an article in the March 1946 Sky & Telescope magazine. This mistake has perpetuated and taken on a life of its own since 1946.

7. Elvis Presley had an unusual propensity for recording "blue" songs, and three of them specifically were blue moon songs: "Blue Moon", "Blue Moon of Kentucky", and "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again".

8. "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again" was written in 1941 by Kentuckians Wiley Walker and Gene Sullivan.

9. The band R.E.M. featured a blue moon on the cover of their "In Time" compilation CD.

10. One of R.E.M.'s biggest hits was "Man on the Moon", which seems to express doubt that mankind actually went to the moon, and also mentions Elvis.

11. In an early interview, Michael Stipe said that R.E.M. actually stood for Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a Kentuckian best known for his epic photographic work The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.

12. The blue people of Kentucky were originally believed by some to be aliens, or angels, from another world.

13. The matriarch of the best-known Kentucky blue-people clan was named Luna.