Moon 'explodes' Friday morning: View it on Capitol Hill (if the clouds clear)

This Friday morning at 4:30 AM, the moon is going to explode -- and you'll want to be in Cal Anderson Park to see it.

The man behind this:

... is throwing a bit of a party in the park early Friday a.m. -- and everybody (especially a body with a telescope) is invited.

Here's the scoop on the man-made celestial event that's going down:

The actual impacts commence at 4:30 am PDT (11:30 UT). The Centaur rocket will strike first, transforming 2200 kg of mass and 10 billion joules of kinetic energy into a blinding flash of heat and light. Researchers expect the impact to throw up a plume of debris as high as 10 km.

Close behind, the LCROSS mothership will photograph the collision for NASA TV and then fly right through the debris plume. Onboard spectrometers will analyze the sunlit plume for signs of water (H₂O), water fragments (OH), salts, clays, hydrated minerals and assorted organic molecules.

"If there's water there, or anything else interesting, we'll find it," says Tony Colaprete of NASA Ames, the mission's principal investigator.

NASA says the resulting explosions should be visible from, well, Cal Anderson Park:

"We expect the debris plumes to be visible through mid-sized backyard telescopes—10 inches and larger," says Brian Day of NASA/Ames. Day is an amateur astronomer and the Education and Public Outreach Lead for LCROSS. "The initial explosions will probably be hidden behind crater walls, but the plumes will rise high enough above the crater's rim to be seen from Earth."

The Pacific Ocean and western parts of North America are favored with darkness and a good view of the Moon at the time of impact.

The only issue -- besides the 4:30 AM thing -- is cloud cover. There's a grey blanket due for Seattle early Friday morning. Pretty typical for Pacific Northwest celestial observations -- even when the moon explodes.