Moon

A celestial spectacle will occur Monday evening when Venus and the moon will appear close together in the western sky. Venus will outshine every star in the sky and will probably be as bright as the moon, which will have only about 15% of its disk showing. Venus is so brilliant because it is closer to the sun than the Earth is and because its clouds reflect sunlight.

The FBI seized a moon rock Friday that an auction house had expected to sell for several hundred thousand dollars. Agents took the rock from Phillips Fine Art Auctioneers in Manhattan in response to a subpoena from a federal grand jury, the FBI said in a statement. A spokesman for the agency refused to provide further details. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration considers all moon rocks to be U.S. government property.

"Apollo 13" star Tom Hanks is set to return to the moon, teaming up with big-screen movie firm Imax Corp. to produce a 3-D documentary about NASA's historic lunar voyages. Imax said Wednesday that the two-time Oscar winner will co-produce and likely narrate "Magnificent Desolation," which will use never-before-seen photographs and previously unreleased NASA footage. Hanks and Imax first announced plans for the project in December 2002, but the 45-minute movie is now on track for a 2005 release.

President Bush has before him a recommendation to establish a permanent human outpost on the moon, to be used to launch a manned mission to Mars, it was learned Tuesday night. The recommendation is contained in the draft of a major speech the President is to give on Thursday, the 20th anniversary of the day Neil A. Armstrong took his "giant leap for mankind" on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Bush said Tuesday that he had not decided what he would say on Thursday.

An attempt to find water on the moon by crashing a used spacecraft into the lunar surface has come up dry, researchers say, confirming the conclusion reached at the time of the experiment. In a report prepared for presentation today at a meeting of astronomers in Padua, Italy, a researcher from the University of Texas said no water was detected when the Lunar Prospector spacecraft smashed into a moon crater.

NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there, if President Obama gets his way. When the White House releases its budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was to return humans to the moon by 2020. The Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to return to the moon.

Despite the myths, a full moon doesn't make epileptic seizures more frequent. Patients were telling Dr. Selim Benbadis, a neurologist at the University of South Florida, that their seizures were triggered or worsened when the moon was full. So Benbadis decided to apply scientific scrutiny to his patients' anecdotal tales. He and three colleagues analyzed 770 seizures, both epileptic and nonepileptic that were monitored at Tampa General Hospital from 1999 to 2001.

Look up into the sky Wednesday night and you will see an event that happens only--dare we say it?--once in a blue moon. The full moon you spot will be the second full moon of the month, a phenomenon known in modern folklore as the "blue moon"--even though it will appear its usual white or ivory color. "It's a vagary of the calendar . . . a natural consequence of the moon that is traveling at its own speed and our absolutely bonkers calendar," said Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory.

NASA has delayed the launch of an unmanned spacecraft to the moon to scout for potential landing sites for astronauts. The moon craft is the first step in NASA's program to send astronauts back to the moon and beyond. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was supposed to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in early December aboard an Atlas V rocket. But the launch was pushed back after NASA agreed to swap with the Air Force, which will fly a prototype space drone.