It’s funny how in the amateur astronomy community we have all these online programs that create nice detailed maps, spreadsheets, and star charts for us about the night sky.
And then there’s lunar-occultations looking like something out of John Badham’s War Games.
THE MOON IS LAUNCHING NUCLEAR STRIKE AGAINST SOUTH AMERICA AND AFRICA. HOW DO WE RESPOND MR PRESIDENT?!
Oh sure, it's easy to look back now with our twenty-twenty hindsight and our armchair quarterbacking and whine and moan about how it all went wrong. But what about the case for blowing up the moon at the time? For literally dozens of years the moon had menaced Western Civilization with its eclipses and its werewolf hordes and its sinister seduction of our seas, all the while dangling its massive stony bulk above us with nothing but universal gravitation standing between the free world and a cold and moony end! Oh, the usual crowd of peaceniks and anti-kill killjoys would have had America stand idly by and do nothing, leaving frightened children and Brookings scholars to tremble under their beds at night while our nation's nocturnal nemesis threatened once again to plunge from the heavens and squish us all, but 9/11 taught us that we can't wait for danger to become dangerous before we pre-re-endanger it back! And by defeating the moon America would ensure not only its own security, but the destruction of al Qaeda's deadly space laser, the liberation of the moon men from the terrible tyranny of the Crater King, and the second coming of Astro-Jesus!
Of course by now everybody thinks they're an expert on every little accident that's happened in the moon war. Oh, we didn't send enough troops, oh, we didn't plan for the aftermath, oh, the explosions launched millions of tons of radioactive moon rock into the atmosphere and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Well, boo hoo hoo! Nobody said this war was gonna be perfect.