"A late moon-forming event, as suggested by our work, is very consistent with an identical Earth and moon," Jacobson said.
One October evening, when the students had gone camping and stayed up late, Moon Sung-il, a 14-year-old North Korean, brought tears to the South Koreans' eyes when he recounted his two-and-a-half-year flight with other defectors that took him through China, Myanmar and a refugee camp in Bangkok.
Decades later the Beat Generation's Jack Kerouac would drum the region's soul, as he wrote how "the most beautiful sleep of my life" occurred along the nearby foothills, between two nations and nothing but the desert mountain country and a late sinking moon. .
"There are several important implications of this late moon formation that have not yet been worked out," Richard Carlson, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.
Soon the stars, and a late-rising moon, will add what they can to the calm outside.
A few days ago, Google unveiled its latest moon shot: a contact lens with a built-in glucose sensor.
GETTING AROUND The latest "Moon Handbook to Peru" (Avalon Travel, 2007; www.moon.com) is useful in planning a trip that includes classic sites like Machu Picchu as well as excursions way off the beaten track.
The latest moon is tucked inside the orbit of Miranda, the innermost of Uranus's five larger satellites.
NASA's latest moon orbiter, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, which launched in September, could shed light on this levitating dust.
Alan Bean says wryly that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Collins — the Apollo 11 crew — were told a month or so before launch that the mission would now include planting an American flag on the moon — a late addition that there wasn't time to practice.
