super moon; did you see it?

Did you see the super moon last night? This was one of rare times when the moon is very close to the earth(it called when the moon is in perigee) and I did get up to see it, here, about 11 pm(ashamed to say, that even on the weekend, I go to bed around 10pm, lol.)

It was SO bright, that our whole living room seemed to have a spot light trained upon it, and even to look at the moon was almost too much to take, as if one was looking into the sun, instead…

It was amazing,but I  didn’t take a photo,, am instead, “borrowing” from some awesome photos posted on the weather networks site……

This picture is by  Laura Watts ;

This one is by David Behren; it’s taken in Quebec, over Lac St. Louis

This one is taken in B.C. by Merton Sprengal

It was an event that had people right across Canada reaching for their cameras.

On Saturday night, the moon was just 357,000 km from our planet – the closest it will get until 2014 – and about 30,000 km less than it’s average distance from Earth.

For observers, that meant that the moon appeared about 16% larger and 30% brighter than other full moons of the year.

It’s what’s known as the “supermoon,” and it caught the attention of thousands – especially those lucky enough to have clear skies during the event.

“Conditions were ideal across many parts of Ontario and Quebec, parts of the Maritimes and British Columbia,” says Dayna Vettese, a meteorologist at The Weather Network. “There was a little more cloud cover in the Prairies and Newfoundland.”

If you got clouded out on Saturday night, astronomer and “night sky guy”Andrew Fazekas suggests watching Sunday night, too. He says the moon should still look great just past its full phase.

The best time to catch the sky show is just after local sunset – looking towards the eastern horizon as the Moon rises. The silvery orbit will probably appear unusually big while near the horizon – a visual illusion, making it an even more impressive sight and photo opportunity.

With files from Andrew Fazekas

supermoon info 

How about you, did you see it?

Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern

For nine internationally celebrated artists, the annual commission to create a sculptural installation in Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall has proved impossible to resist. But with striking exceptions, such as Olafur Eliasson’s apocalyptic The Weather Project in 2004 (the giant disc resembling the setting sun) and Doris Salcedo’s unforgettable Shibboleth in 2008 (the trompe l’oeil crack in the foundations of the building), one after another of them has fallen flat on their face.

Not this year. For the 11th commission in the Unilever series, Tate Modern has offered the poisoned chalice to the Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei – and he’s come up with a masterpiece.

At first and even second glance, Sunflower Seeds doesn’t look like much – a minimalist rectangle of gray stones such as Richard Long might have made on some beach in Iceland. Only when you look closer do you realise the ‘stones’ are large sunflower seeds, and only when you pick one up do you understand they are not real seeds, but hand-painted replicas made of porcelain. From even a short distance away they appear to be interchangeable; in fact no two are exactly alike.

Did I mention that there are one hundred million of them? That is five times the population of Beijing. It took 1,600 people two and a half years to manufacture the number the artist needed to make the piece you see at Tate Modern. Like so much else about China, on paper such figures are almost meaningless. Only by seeing it can you begin to grasp its immensity. Standing before it, we look out over an immeasurable, fathomless grey sea.

But the moment when you step on it, your relationship to what lies beneath your feet changes. Each crunching footstep merely displaces a thin layer at the top of the pile. Our weight leaves no impression on the millions and millions of seeds beneath our feet. What from afar had been far too immense for the imagination to grasp instantly becomes as worthless as gravel. Were Tate Modern to lose a million sunflower seeds during the run of this show, I doubt very much anyone would notice.

Ai Weiwei has said that he chose to reproduce sunflower seeds in porcelain because during the famine years under Mao they were one of the few reliable sources of food, comfort and social interaction. For him they symbolise the Chinese people. Seen through his eyes, the piece is a powerful political statement about the relationship between rulers and the ruled in China.

The artist mentioned one other statistic that is relevant for understanding the piece. One hundred million is nearly one quarter of the number of China’s internet users. Intrinsic to the work’s meaning, Ai Weiwei will be online, tweeting and responding to questions from the public during the run of the show. Without the internet, he is saying, his countrymen are destined to be crushed underfoot by rulers who do not see – and do not want to see the individual within the mass. But with four hundred million people in touch with each other through the internet, who knows what may happen in the future?