First quarter moon will grace the sky on June 2. How to catch a glimpse.
First quarter moon will grace the sky on June 2. How to catch a glimpse.
Show Caption
Hide Caption
James Webb captures Jupiter's shimmering aurora
NASA'S James Webb Space Telescope captured new details of auroras on Jupiter.
Half of the moon will be illuminated as it reaches its first quarter phase on Monday, June 2.
The first quarter phase marks the quarter point on the moon's monthly journey, according to NASA.
During this position, the moon's illuminated side is half-lit, according to the agency.
A first-quarter moon is ideal for observing here on Earth, NASA says, because it rises in the afternoon — around noon — and is high above the horizon in the evening before setting around midnight.
Here's what to know about the first quarter phase and how to best view the moon.
What is the moon's first quarter phase?
The moon has both a day and night side, with the sun always illuminating half of the moon. The portion of the illuminated half changes as the moon travels through its orbit.
First quarter is the third phase of the moon's eight lunar phases. The cycle repeats about every 29.5 days, according to NASA.
During the first quarter phase, one half of the moon will appear illuminated by direct sunlight, per NASA.
However, even though the moon is half-visible from Earth during first quarter, it's not actually a half moon. According to NASA, during first quarter, only half of the moon's illuminated half is visible on Earth.
A full moon is technically a half moon, because the sun is illuminating the full day side of the moon during that phase, per NASA.
When will the moon be half-lit?
According to NASA, the moon will reach first quarter, or 50% illuminated, just before 11 p.m. EST, in the Northern Hemisphere on June 2. The exact timing will differ based on location.
On the East Coast, the moon is expected to be at first quarter around 11:40 p.m. EST, according to In-The-Sky.org.
The next first quarter phase will be on July 2, according to NASA.
How to see a first quarter moon
The moon's first quarter phase will be visible here on Earth. For those looking to catch a glimpse, NASA recommends a set of binoculars or a telescope, which will highlight the moon's texture and terrain.
However, bare eyes also work. With no tools on hand, NASA says to look carefully and give your eyes time plenty of time to adjust — what you can see will vary based on your eyesight.
When eyeballing the moon, you'll mostly see areas of either white or gray. The gray patches, called lunar maria or seas, are solidified volcanic lavas, according to NASA.
NASA has a daily viewing guide which highlights the lunar maria that you may be able to see from Earth.
Melina Khan is a national trending reporter for USA TODAY. She can be reached at melina.khan@usatoday.com.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Amid cuts, Trump's proposed NASA budget would lay waste to new Artemis launch tower
Work for now continues daily at Kennedy Space Center on a new mobile launch tower that has already cost more than $1 billion. But the Artemis moon mission it is intended to serve may never happen if President Trump's plans for NASA come to fruition. The mobile launcher 2 has been rising steadily at a construction site just north of the massive Vehicle Assembly Building, where it stands now at 320 feet tall on its way to a target of 390 feet. It's designed to support a larger version of the Space Launch System rocket called the SLS Block 1B beginning with the Artemis IV mission. But Trump's proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 has spiked future use of the SLS rocket after Artemis III, a move that comes amid $6 billion in cuts to the agency's overall spending plan. An existing mobile launcher, ML-1, was used on the uncrewed Artemis I test flight of SLS and the Orion spacecraft in 2022, and is in place within the VAB for the Artemis II mission, a crewed flight that will go around but not land on the moon. It is set to fly in early 2026. ML-1 would be used for a final time for the Artemis III mission, which aims to return humans to the surface of the moon as early as summer 2027. But after that, Trump wants to find different solutions to send crew and cargo to the moon and onto Mars. That would leave ML-2 with no purpose, and its fate could be similar to its predecessor, which sat unused at KSC for years after the end of the Constellation program. Eventually, though, the launcher was repurposed for use on the first three Artemis missions. 'NASA will close out Mobile Launcher-2 development, as ML-2 will not be needed to support SLS due to the orderly shutdown of the SLS Block 1B upgrade,' reads the budget proposal. 'NASA proposes to use previously appropriated unobligated balances to support the termination of these activities, including but not limited to, ongoing administration, oversight, and monitoring.' That would include money that would be paid out to lead contractor Bechtel National Inc., which was initially awarded a $383 million contract in 2019 with a delivery date of 2023. NASA's Office of the Inspector General released an audit in August 2024 that said the costs had already nearly tripled to more than $1 billion with the delivery date pushed to no later than November 2026. The budget also calls for an end to NASA's Exploration Ground Systems team that supports Artemis launches. NASA, which employs for now around 18,000, has not said how many people fall under EGS, but its budgets in 2024 and 2025 neared $884 million. Trump's proposed budget would drop that to $658 million for 2026, $700 million in 2027, $500 million in 2028, and then nothing beyond that. 'NASA will utilize a commercial partnership through a competitive contract to transport crew for future Artemis missions,' the budget proposal states. The move to kill the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft by Trump comes amid criticism of the program's continued delays and ballooning costs. The OIG in a 2023 audit warned that by the time Artemis III finally flies, NASA will have spent more than $93 billion across its various facets including SLS, Orion and Exploration Ground Systems. Instead, Trump's goal is to rely on commercial launch providers such as SpaceX's in-development Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn for future moon and Mars missions. 'New transportation services contracts will permit more frequent missions to the moon while at the same time freeing up resources to invest in the infrastructure necessary to conduct longer stays on the lunar surface than ever before,' reads a note within the budget proposal from interim NASA Administrator Janet Petro. Overall, Trump's proposed NASA budget would drop dramatically from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion, proposing to kill off not only future SLS launches, but gutting much of the agency's science portfolio. 'This budget is a retreat, a narrowing of ambition,' reads a critical statement from nonprofit group The Planetary Society. 'This request represents the smallest NASA budget since FY 1961 — a level enacted before the first American had launched into space.' Calling it an 'extinction-level event' for NASA's science efforts, the group noted the budget would kill 41 science projects, or 1/3 of NASA's science portfolio. But the agency contends it's focusing on moon and Mars missions instead. 'With a leaner budget across all of government, we are all taking a closer look at how we work, where we invest, and how we adjust our methods to accomplish our mission,' the proposal reads. 'At NASA, that means placing a renewed emphasis on human spaceflight – increasing investments in a sustainable plan to return to the Moon for long-term human exploration and accelerating efforts to send American astronauts to Mars.' A shift from a nationally sponsored rocket program to reliance on commercial partners for launch doesn't necessarily mean an economic downturn for the Space Coast, according to the Space Florida, the state's aerospace economic development entity. 'Florida's strategic investments over the years have paid off in building a diverse and robust ecosystem that's well-positioned to fuel the growth of the aerospace sector — regardless of how national priorities evolve,' said Space Florida's Director of Public Relations Alayna Curry. Part of that is a massive $1.8 billion infrastructure project by SpaceX to support two launch sites of Starship once it becomes operational. Despite the uncertain future, Bechtel continues to work on the job given. 'We're constantly looking at potential (fiscal) challenges based on priorities and other things that are going on within NASA,' said Michael Costas, general manager of Defense and Space Business with Bechtel, in November just after the election. 'They're having to work through whatever challenges they're facing. But of course — new administration — there's a lot of folks looking at efficiencies.' Congress is the ultimate decider on what gets funded for NASA, though, and without a viable replacement for SLS in place yet, it may be that ML-2 still has a future. NASA had continued to tout its progress on regular updates through the first several months of the year. The latest addition was added in May with only two more to come. Bechtel's goal was to hand over to NASA the completed tower no later than November 2026, which would give NASA enough time to prep it for what was supposed to be an Artemis IV flight by September 2028. NASA included the previous added sections in a list of achievement in Trump's first 100 days in office, stating 'the agency's next-generation mobile launcher continues to take shape, with the sixth of 10 massive modules being installed. This structure will carry future Artemis rockets to the launch pad.' That was before the proposed budget came out, though. 'We must continue to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars,' reads the budget proposal. 'That means making strategic decisions — including scaling back or discontinuing ineffective efforts not aligned with our moon and Mars exploration priorities.' The warnings from The Planetary Society, which have been echoed by many naysayers to Trump's new direction, say the agency is choosing a ruinous path. 'President Trump has stated he is 'committed to ensuring that America continues to lead the way in fueling the pursuit of space discovery and exploration',' the Society's statement reads. 'This budget does the exact opposite: laying waste to the nation's ability to lead in scientific discovery, destroying the economic powerhouse that is NASA, and abandoning allies around the globe.'
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
60 years ago, Ed White went out for walk
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. On this day (June 3) 60 years ago, a NASA astronaut stepped outside his Gemini spacecraft and made history as the first American to perform an extavehicular activity (EVA), or spacewalk. NASA astronaut Edward H. White II left his Gemini 4 capsule and crew mate Jim McDivitt for a 20-minute spacewalk on June 3, 1965. It was only the second extravehicular activity (EVA) ever made (the first was by Soviet-era cosmonaut Alexei Leonov a few months earlier) and the first by an American. White brought with him a camera and a small jet pack; the latter did not work very well. He was connected to his spacecraft by an umbilical. Gemini 4 entered an orbit about Earth between 103 and 180 miles (165 and 289 kilometers) in altitude. During the spacewalk, White was in radio contact with ground controllers in Hawaii and Houston. There are other, better-composed photos of White on the same historic spacewalk, but this one can be used to illustrate one of, if not the most important lesson NASA learned from his EVA: They did not know how yet to spacewalk. White floated well enough, but he had no real control of his movements, even with a prototype handheld jet pack. There were no handrails for him to use on the outside of the Gemini capsule, and he had not trained in neutral buoyancy underwater — the best analog for the conditions in the vacuum of space. Still, even with the troubles he encountered, White called the end of his EVA the "saddest moment" of his life. You can read more about the history and basics of spacewalking and learn more about Ed White's Gemini 4 EVA.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Is this the end of the world? How a galactic pile-up could bring Earth's violent finish: Cosmic ‘coin flip'
Forget killer asteroids and nuclear annihilation — Earth's ultimate fate may hinge on a cosmic coin toss. Astronomers have revealed that our Milky Way galaxy has a 50/50 chance of colliding with its massive neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, sometime in the next 10 billion years — an intergalactic smash-up that could fling our solar system into deep space or swallow Earth whole. Cue the sci-fi panic — or not. 'It used to appear destined to merge with Andromeda forming a colossal 'Milkomeda,'' said Professor Alis Deason, a computational cosmologist at Durham University, per The Daily Mail. 'Now, there is a chance that we could avoid this fate entirely.' In other words: The end of the world may not be as inevitable as we thought — at least not from the galaxy next door. The new study, published in 'Nature Astronomy,' analyzed 100,000 simulations of the Milky Way's future. The findings — thanks to refined data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Gaia mission — dramatically downshifted previous predictions of a guaranteed galactic pile-up in just 5 billion years. 'In short, the probability went from near-certainty to a coin flip,' lead author Dr. Till Sawala, of the University of Helsinki, revealed to The findings factor in the gravitational tug of neighboring galaxies — most notably the Large Magellanic Cloud, a much smaller satellite galaxy whose pull may be yanking the Milky Way off a crash course. 'The main difference between our research and previous studies is that we benefited from newer and more precise data, and that we considered a more complete system,' Sawala said to the site. While a 220,000 mph galaxy-on-galaxy collision sounds catastrophic, astronomers say a head-on impact is 'very unlikely.' In fact, only 2% of simulations showed a direct hit within 5 billion years. Most scenarios had the galaxies swirling toward each other, possibly merging much later — or not at all. Still, if they do collide, it could be a literal star show. 'We see external galaxies often colliding and merging with other galaxies, sometimes producing the equivalent of cosmic fireworks,' said Durham cosmologist Professor Carlos Frenk, via The Daily Mail. 'Until now, we thought this was the fate that awaited our Milky Way galaxy. We now know that there is a very good chance that we may avoid that scary destiny.' But even if Earth sidesteps this stellar shakedown, don't get too comfortable. As The Post previously reported, our sun is expected to become a bloated red giant in about 5 billion years — likely boiling away Earth's oceans or swallowing the planet entirely. So, yeah. Pick your apocalypse. 'If [the Milky Way-Andromeda collision] happens, it might take place after the Earth and the sun no longer exist,' Sawala told The Daily Mail. 'Even if it happens before that, it's very unlikely that something would happen to Earth in this case.' Translation: By the time the universe gets around to smashing the Milky Way, we'll probably already be toast. Still, some experts say galactic fate is more than just an astronomer's obsession. 'The fate of our Milky Way galaxy is a subject of broad interest — not just to astronomers,' Raja GuhaThakurta of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told the Associated Press. And while the galaxy might survive — barely — we may not. As Sawala put it: 'Of course, there is also a very significant chance that humanity will bring an end to itself still much before that, without any need for astrophysical help.' Talk about a stellar self-own.
