The next Full Moon is Saturday night, December 18. It’ll be the highest-up Full Moon of the year, and will attain that overhead position at midnight.  Very cool, but why tell you all about it more than a month early? It’s sort of a lame excuse, but we mistakenly ran the illustration for it last week, with no caption, guaranteed to produce bewilderment in any sane person. So clip this out and save this article until then — or indeed for any Full Moon. Because you really should realize why they’re so special.

The universe’s bodies are mostly spheres, and, obviously, every location on each of those balls has a spot precisely opposite it — its antipode. Some of them cry out for our attention.

Colonizing other planets means living with increased radiation. Starting in 1969, when the first of 24 astronauts ventured beyond both our planet›s atmosphere and its magnetosphere, they left behind all layers of cosmic ray protection. US astronaut Shannon Lucid cites this hazard as the biggest challenge in space exploration.