 Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day podcast. Today's picture for March 11th of 2024 is titled A Full Plankton Moon. So what do we see here? Here we see multiple images of the moon as it sinks down toward the horizon setting. Now you may think it looks a little unusual that it's setting straight down. That's not how most of us in the world actually see things set. This happens when you are in the equatorial regions, and the path of the moon would be almost straight down then. If you're farther north or south of the equator, then you tend to see it at an angle. And the farther you get from the equator, the shallower that angle will be. So it will be almost opposite of what you're seeing here, setting at a very great angle as it comes down. Now we see the moon also. We can note that it changes color here. Now the moon itself does not change color. The moon is always the same. And if you looked at it out in space, you would not see any differences in the coloring. The differences that we see are due to the fact that the Earth has an atmosphere. And Earth's atmosphere is very good at scattering light. And in fact it's better at scattering short wavelengths of light, like blue and green, and not so good at scattering the red wavelengths of light, the reds and the oranges, those longer wavelengths. So as you get closer to the horizon, you're looking through longer and longer stretches of atmosphere, and that allows for more scattering. That is why we see both the moon and the sun as turning red as they get close to the horizon at sunrise, sunset, or moonrise and moon set. As they get closer there, they will look redder and redder. And we can note that here in the image where it goes from almost a whitish-gray color toward the top, then into yellows and oranges, and in fact a very deep red color as it gets closer to the horizon. And again, that's just because of our atmosphere. Had we no atmosphere, the color of the moon would remain unchanged as it changed its position in the sky. It's all due to Earth's atmosphere scattering that light. Now the blue color that we see down below is actually plankton, and it's a bioluminescence that we see due to the plankton striking the shore because of the waves, and that causes them to glow. Now it may also be some kind of mechanism to deter predators is something that is thought, but the brightness that we see there, we can see that bioluminescent plankton down below on the shore as the waves come crashing in, and of course up above in the sky we see multiple images of the moon as it descends toward the horizon. So that was our picture of the day for March 11th of 2024. It was titled A Full Plankton Moon. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture, previewed to be Horizon Spiral. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow. And until then, have a great day everyone, and I will see you in class.