The moon is expected to go into total eclipse Tuesday morning, making the moon appear brown or maybe deep redwhich happens to be winter solstice. NASA says the moon will begin its move into Earth’s shadow at about 1 a.m., but the best view won’t happen until about 1:30 a.m. Then, for around one hours and twelve minutes, the moon will be in total eclipse from 2:41 a.m. until 3:53 a.m.

Then the moon will start to reappear, and partial eclipse will be visible until 5 a.m. NASA says a lunar eclipse on winter solstice hasn’t happened since 1378. If it’s a clear night, the best views will be seen in North and Central America.

After Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar panels in the White House – only to be uninstalled by Ronald Regan in the 1980s, Ecorazzi is reporting that the Globama campaign is urging Obama to undo Regan’s handy work.

And talk about recycling! Obama could haul the solar panels out of storage and just reinstall them.

Moreover, Sungevity and other solar companies have also offered to install rooftop solar panels at no cost. Author Bill McKibben is taking matters into his own hands. On September 7, he’ll arrive in D.C. with a group of green activists to hand-deliver an original Carter administration solar panel to the White House. Here’s hoping they get the memo!

A Swiss research group landed their solar powered aircraft successfully after completing an overnight flight Thursday. The plane was able to fly at night as it was able to store energy it was able to gather during the day.

The Solar Impulse, a four-engine plane, took off from Switzerland’s Payerne airbase early Wednesday and returned at dawn Thursday.

“It was unbelievable, success better than we expected,” the plane’s pilot, Andre Borschberg, a Swiss air force veteran, told Reuters television. “We almost thought to make it longer, but we demonstrated what we wanted to demonstrate so they made me come back,” he said.

“This is a highly symbolic moment,” said Bertrand Piccard, initiator and president of Solar Impulse, in a statement.

“I’ve been a pilot for 40 years now, but this flight has been the most incredible one of my flying career,” Borschberg said. “Just sitting there and watching the battery charge level rise and rise, thanks to the sun.”

He added that he had flown the entire trip without using any fuel or causing pollution, flying the aircraft to an altitude of 8,654 meters while achieving a top ground speed of 68 knots.

Created for the Evolo Skyscraper Design Competition, the Gyre Seascraper is a floating zero emissions eco-development from Zigloo Design, a Canadian based company. Only at the conception stages this underwater skyscraper was created to bring both scientists and tourists together to better understand the ocean.

The multi-level design spanning 52.3 acres, uses wind, solar, and tidal energy generation technologies all while providing adequate space for living and working, shops, restaurants, gardens, and recreation activities. Cool, sounds like its right out of an amazing Sci-Fi movie!

With radial arm that extend out from the central area for stabilization this also creates a 1.25km long port which makes it perfect for accommodating the worlds largest ships.

The centre column of the Gyre Seascraper features multiple floor levels within a double-hulled vortex with glass windows. The top two levels are dedicated to restaurants, shopping and community activities while the intermediate levels are designed to accommodate long-term residents, ocean experts, and hotel guests, with room for more than 2000 people. The lowest levels are dedicated to oceanographic research and also will feature space for a public interpretive centre.

Although, Haiti is looking at a long road to recovery due to the recent earthquakes there, the abundance of sun the country gets makes solar power a viable option to restoring their power infrastructure.

Many non profits as well as solar power companies are facing on binging solar-powered equipment capable of providing essential needs like drinkable water, cooking surfaces and mobile phones to the people of Haiti.

Organizations providing solar-powered relief include:

Sol Inc. – They have contributed close to 100 solar-powered streetlights that can be installed in less than an hour, stay lit all night and stand up to hurricane-force winds.

Sun Ovens International – They’ve delivered hundreds of solar-powered ovens to homeless camps which will be capable of making 1,200 meals in eight hours.

Worldwater & Solar Technologies – They have donated a solar-powered mobile water purification system which pumps out 30,000 gallons of clean water daily at a Red Cross aid station along with a 22 kW array that is running a boarding school for 350 kids.

Digicel – The organization has donated close to 1,000 solar mobile phones allowing lines of communication open during this crisis.

The global engineering company Ingenieurgesellschaft Auto und Verkehr (IAV) has a plan to get crafty with our roadways. This company is working on a way to refuel electric cars while they are both driving and parked via road embedded solar panels and piezoelectric generators.

In execution, the transfer of energy from the solar track to the vehicle would be without cables or connectors, taking advantage of electric flowing currents. The ultimate goal towards this futuristic road way is to allow vehicles to both move or charge, regardless of weather conditions and free of mechanical wear.

The team at IAV is confident this technology will launch in the next two years and they are currently in planning stages, on the way to a full-scale test track.

Read more about IAV and what they are working on here.

Burr. It’s getting chilly out there, but thanks to the German designer Yiran Qian’s dream of an “Endless Warm: you will never have to have frozen fingers again. Yiran conceptualized the integration of solar panels into winter hats and gloves for Design Boom’s Green Life Design Competition. And even though this is still just in the idea phase this concept is a neat idea that hopefully in the future will help melt away our winter blues.

Google Earth has unveiled a crystal-ball like feature that will predict what planet will look like up to the year 2100. Using data provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Google has created a new 3D mapping program that will show the range of expected climate change under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century.

Narrated by Al Gore, Google will also add layers showing what communities around the world are doing to combat climate change.

The Wide Area Search for Planets, a consortium of British universities, discovered a new planet they have dubbed WASP-17. The planet orbits in the reverse direction as the star it revolves around, which is the opposite of every other known planet in the universe.

“Newly formed solar systems can be violent places,” Astronomer David Anderson of Britain’s Keele University said in a press release. “Our own moon is thought to have been created when a Mars-sized planet collided with the recently formed Earth and threw up a cloud of debris.

“A near collision during the early, violent stage of this planetary system could well have caused a gravitational slingshot, flinging WASP-17 into its backwards orbit.”

Located 1000 light years from Earth, WASP-17 is twice the size of Jupiter. The team discovered the planet via cameras that monitor hundreds of thousands of stars.

Stargazers will be treated to the most spectacular part of an ongoing meteor shower on Tuesday night. The Perseid meteor shower, a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle, occurs every August and this year, the show begins after sunset on Tuesday, August 11th, and will continue until dawn on Wednesday. During the long night, specataors could see dozens of meteors per hour.

However, a common weather pattern to the Pacific Northwest could really mess up plans for those living in that region who want to make an event out of it, as weather reports are calling for cloudy skies.