Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for July 20, 2018

Arlo is moony about it and nobody is going to talk him out of it!

Chances are he would look at it for 5 minutes then say " Well, I saw it " and head inside to the TV. Mosquitoes you know.

When the moon gets in your eye like a big a pizza pie….That’s amore. It’s not the same as not being visible. How do you create a new line? I wanted to make this like a verse but it made it all one line.

Appropriate that Jimmy would have a Moon strip today.

I noticed! It was the start of Av!

Look at Arlo’s face in panel 4. He hasn’t Janis’ moon in a while either!

It’s a lucky man who can see a full moon everyday.

I thought apogee and zenith were the same thing, but no! Apogee (apex) is the highest point in an orbit. Zenith is the closest to the observer’s “up.” Reading comics can lead us all to learn more.

The moon being at apogee is but one factor making this the longest. At apogee it is moving the slowest in its orbit. A bigger factor would be whether the moon passes through the center of the earth’s shadow or closer to an edge. Arlo (and we) won’t see it because we are on the sun side at alignment.

Janis is ever the pragmatist.

We live out in the country, with plenty of open sky. A looong time ago, some friends came over and we stood outside in frigid temps to watch a lunar eclipse. Hubby doesn’t like hot drinks, but the other three of us were guzzling coffee. He finally asked me for my cup, which really surprised me. He didn’t want to drink it; he only wanted it to warm his hands.

“Define the word ‘apogee’.” “Far out, man!”

Hah! Janis was very correct!!!! Wonderful.

Arlo’s right that we won’t be able to see it. There’ll be no visibility in North America. The best places to view it will be in eastern Africa and western Asia.

Happy Armstrong – Aldrin Day.

[General Science Nerd here]

Janis got here astronomy wrong.

Screwing up the dates of something like this always annoys me, especially when they could have got it right so easily.

The eclipse is on July 27, a week from now, exactly as Arlo says. But Janis says that ‘two weeks ago’ the moon was not visible. This is wrong – two weeks ago it was at half full, as it is right now. One week ago it was new, and not visible.

BTW, right now the Moon and Jupiter are strikingly close together in the sky.

Rimshot.