Word: moone
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Tides are caused largely by the gravitational tug of the moon, which daily forces great upward and downward movement in the oceans. The pull of the distant sun also influences the tides, and when the orbits of the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun bring all three bodies roughly into line, the tidal changes are much larger than usual. These "spring" tides (named for the verb rather than the season) occur twice a month: when the moon is full and when it is new. Spring tides themselves may be driven to further extremes when the elliptical...
...year 1974 will bring several such outsize tides. On Jan. 8, and again on Feb. 6-7, the moon will be particularly close to earth. The earth will also be close to the sun, and all three bodies, sun, moon and earth, will have moved almost into a straight line.* Thus spring tides along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in early January and February -and again around July 19 and Aug. 17, when similar conditions will occur -should be particularly extreme...
...they were directly in line, the result would be an eclipse of the moon...
Died. Gerard Peter Kuiper, 68, astronomer and director of the unmanned Ranger lunar photographic missions that helped pinpoint landing sites for the Apollo moon shots; of a heart attack; in Mexico City. As a director of the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory, he made a number of important discoveries, including satellites of both Uranus (1948) and Neptune (1949). When, in the early 1960s, other scientists were concerned that a spacecraft landing on the moon would sink in an ocean of dust, Kuiper correctly described the lunar surface as resembling "crunchy snow...
Died. Charles Greeley Abbot, 101, astrophysicist, inventor and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from 1928-44; in Riverdale, Md. In 1972, a crater on the moon's dark side was named for Abbot, who spent more than 70 years studying the effects of solar radiation on terrestrial weather patterns and patented numerous devices for converting the sun's heat into energy...