The Full Moon of Tuesday, Sept. 28 also carries the title of the Harvest Moon for those living in the Northern Hemisphere. The Moon officially turns full when it reaches that spot in the sky opposite to the Sun.
According to SPACE.com, this moment will occur Tuesday at 13:08 Greenwich Time.
The Harvest Moon Moon is the one that comes the closest to the September equinox, so this year it falls in September, although in one out of three years this title can be bestowed upon the October Full Moon.
The 2004 version of the Harvest Moon comes relatively close to the equinox--slightly less than five days after it--although it can occur as early as Sept. 8 (as in 1976) or as late as Oct. 7 (as in 1987).
Many think the Harvest Moon remains in the night sky longer than any of the other Full Moons we see during the year, but that is not so.
What sets Tuesday's Full Moon apart from the others is that farmers at the climax of the current harvest season can work late into the night by the Moon's light. It rises about the time the Sun sets, but more importantly, at this time of year, instead of rising its normal average 50 minutes later each day, the Moon seems to rise at nearly the same time each night.
In actuality, for those living at mid-northern latitudes, the rising of the Moon comes, on average, roughly 25 minutes later each night. The night-to-night difference is greatest for more southerly locations, while the difference is less than the average at more northerly locations.
The reason for this seasonal circumstance is that the Moon appears to move along the ecliptic, and at this time of year when rising, the ecliptic makes its smallest angle with respect to the horizon for those living in the Northern Hemisphere.
In contrast, for those living in the Southern Hemisphere, the ecliptic at this time of year appears to stand almost perpendicular (at nearly a right angle) to the eastern horizon. As such, the difference for the time of moonrise exceeds the average of 50 minutes per night.
One of things to consider is the Moon's location in the sky during the eclipse. For those who live along the West Coast of the US and Canada this will be an important factor, since initially the eclipse will be rather low in the east-northeast sky. Will tall trees or nearby buildings block your view of the Moon?
During that Thursday night and early Friday morning, the Moon--21/2 days past full--will be very near (within a couple of degrees) to the region of the sky where it will also be on the night of Oct. 27-28 during the eclipse.

Physicists in France have discovered a liquid that "freezes" when it is heated, physicsweb.org said.
Marie Plazanet and colleagues at the UniversitŽ Joseph Fourier and the Institut Laue-Langevin, both in Grenoble, found that a simple solution composed of two organic compounds becomes a solid when it is heated to temperatures between 45 and 75¸C, and becomes a liquid when cooled again.
The team says that hydrogen bonds are responsible for this novel behavior.
Solids usually melt when they are heated, and liquids turn into gas, although exceptions do exist when heating leads to chemical changes that cannot be reversed, such as polymerization.
However, a reversible transition in which a liquid becomes a solid when heated has never been observed until now.
Plazanet and colleagues prepared a liquid solution containing ?-cyclodextrine (?CD), water and 4-methylpyridine (4MP). Cyclodextrines are cyclic structures containing hydroxyl end groups that can form hydrogen bonds with either the 4MP or water molecules.
At room temperature, up to 300 grams of ?CD can be dissolved in a litre of 4MP. The resulting solution is homogenous and transparent, but it becomes a milky-white solid when heated. The temperature at which it becomes a solid falls as the concentration of ?CD increases.
Neutron-scattering studies revealed that the solid phase is a "sol-gel" system in which the formation of hydrogen bonds between the ?CD and the 4MP leads to an ordered, rigid structure. At lower temperatures, however, the hydrogen bonds tend to break and reform within the ?CD, which results in the solution becoming a liquid again.
Molecular dynamics simulations by Plazanet and co-workers confirmed that the cyclodextrine ring becomes distorted as it is heated up to close to the solidification temperature.
The hydrogen bonds within the ?CD break and the hydroxyl groups rotate towards the outside, which allows a network of bonds to form between the different molecules.
The team has found a number of cyclodextrine/pyridine systems that also become solid when heated, and is now looking more closely at the structure of the sol-gel system to understand the solidification mechanism in more detail.

A gene in malaria parasites could explain why drugs to treat the disease fail, BBC Online quoted researchers as saying.
Previous research found mutations in a gene called pfcrt helped malaria parasites escape the action of the anti-malaria drug chloroquine.
Now Molecular Cell reports scientists have found faults in the same gene that make other anti-malaria drugs fail.
Researches at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine worked with the US Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
They uncovered the new mutations in the pfcrt gene while they were creating strains of malaria parasite that resisted treatment to malaria drugs other than chloroquine.
Chloroquine is one of the most affordable and widely used anti-malarial drugs, but resistance has become increasingly common.
Two drugs used to treat mild to moderate cases of chloroquine resistance are halofantrine and amantadine.
Dr. David Fidock and colleagues found as resistance to these two drugs increased, the parasites lost their resistance to chloroquine.
When they looked closer, they found new mutations in the pfcrt gene.
One of these mutations has been found in a strain of malaria from Southeast Asia.
The scientists said this suggests what they have discovered in the laboratory could have implications for malaria treatments in the real world.

Large colonies of microorganisms living under rocks have been discovered in the most hostile and extreme regions of the Arctic and Antarctic--giving new insights on survival of life on other planets.
Reporting in this week's Nature, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography reveal their surprise findings that rock-dwelling micro-organisms can photosynthesize and store carbon just as much as the plants, lichens and mosses that live above ground.
BAS microbiologist Dr. Charles Cockell says, "Although it's usual to find micro-organisms thriving under quartz and translucent rocks in hot deserts because enough light gets through, we wouldn't have expected this type of colonization in the Polar Regions, where most of the rocks are opaque.
Also, the harsh UV- radiation and violent winds make for a hostile environment. We found that in fact the opaque rocks protect the microorganisms and, the movement of rocks during the annual freeze-thaw allows cracks to form and light to penetrate beneath the surface.
"This shows us that places we may think of as extreme--for example other planets like Mars--could nurture surprising habitats for life. The Poles are not the barren wilderness, devoid of life as we previously thought".

Beyond the tired clichŽs and sperm-and-egg basics taught in grade school science class, researchers are discovering that men and women are even more different than anyone realized, AP reported.
It turns out that major illnesses like heart disease and lung cancer are influenced by gender and that perhaps treatments for women ought to be slightly different from the approach used for men.
These discoveries are part of a quiet but revolutionary change infiltrating U.S. medicine as a growing number of scientists realize there's more to women's health than just the anatomy that makes them female, and that the same diseases often affect men and women in different ways.
"Women are different than men, not only psychologically (but) physiologically, and I think we need to understand those differences," says Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.