Whenever I’m outside, and I happen to know where the Moon should be, I look for it. Sometimes it’s a waning gibbous phase, low in the west at sunrise. Or it might be a half Moon, high in the south at sunset. My favorite is the thin crescent, a "fingernail" Moon, hanging near the horizon.
The thinner the crescent, the harder it is to see. That’s because when it’s really thin it’s just hard to find, of course, but also because the thinner it is, the closer it must be to the Sun in the sky. We see lunar phases because the geometry of the Earth-Moon-Sun system changes, and the phase depends on where the Moon is relative to the Sun. A thin crescent is always surrounded by bright sky, and is also near the blinding Sun. That’s quite a gauntlet to pass!
It’s tough to photograph, too, which is why that image above is so remarkable. The Moon was about 24 hours from being new — meaning that in only a day it would be at the closest point to the Sun in the sky — when that picture was taken. The picture is eerily lovely, but to my eye, is all the more cooler because of the circumstances under which the photographer got it. The story is written on the wonderful Lunar Picture of the Day website (tip o’ the dew shield to Chuck Wood from LPOD — with whom I recently had lunch — for the picture). Give it a read– you might want to try for a young Moon sometime yourself!
July 25th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
Trying to spot a New Moon has been a hobby of mine(sort of) for some time now. My personal record is 24h51m after Dark Moon
.
Thanks for the link, that’s a beautoful picture.
July 25th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Phil, that link to Lunar Photo Of the Day doesn’t seem to work.
July 26th, 2006 at 12:22 am
The BA mistyped the HTML. I’m sure he’ll have it fixed soon, but in the mean time, here’s the address:
http://www.lpod.org/?p=436
Also, check this out this image:
http://www.lpod.org/?m=20060722
That was taken by an “amateur”!
July 26th, 2006 at 5:17 am
I got a slice of moon once
it was about 12oz / pound
pass the crackers there Gromit
July 26th, 2006 at 5:56 am
Also, check this out this image:
http://www.lpod.org/?m=20060722
That was taken by an “amateurâ€!
An amateur with a spaceship, perhaps?
Wow! That’s amazing. Thanks for pointing it out.
July 26th, 2006 at 7:02 am
Regarding the Moon and its motion with respect to us:
I have often had to point out to people that the famous footage (taken, I think by the Apollo 12 astronauts) does *not* show a real “Earthrise”, as the Lunar Module was flying across the surface of the Moon at the time it was taken (please correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.) Thus I have always maintained that the Earth does not move in the Moon’s “sky”, but merely goes through phases.
However, Using the brilliant Celestia program I discovered that if you could stand on the edge of the Moon (as seen from Earth) you would actually see an Earthrise once a month, due to the fact that the Moon wobbles slightly in its orbit. In fact by selecting the spot very carefully and speeding up the program you will see the Earth rise up from the horizon just enough for the Sun to pass underneath before the Earth circles back down again in what almost appears to be a kind of celestial choreography. Celestia shows that it does move, albeit only slightly, making a tiny circle once per Lunar month. This is just enough to produce a spectacular Earthrise providing you stand at just the right spot. Something to remember if you ever find yourself wandering around the Lunar surface with nothing to do!
July 26th, 2006 at 8:40 am
i’m always a little surprised how few people understand how the phases of the moon work. it’s especially bad when authors try to describe the moon for the sake of atmosphere, and end up with a crescent moon appearing 8 days after a full moon (JRR Tolkien made this mistake in LOTR). Better to just leave it out altogether than have your ignorance in print for the appreciation of future generations.
July 26th, 2006 at 8:47 am
Ditto that. When you begin to intuitively understand moon phases, it’s amazing how much people get it wrong. I remember watching The Simpsons once which showed the outside of the house at night when the family were eating dinner. The moon was a crescent low over the house, with the horns pointing to the upper right. In other words, about 4 am. Unless the Simpsons live in the Southern hemisphere.
July 26th, 2006 at 9:12 am
I fixed the link. One irritating thing about WordPress is that it tries to “fix” broken HTML tags, and sometimes makes them worse.
July 26th, 2006 at 11:24 am
To be fair to Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings was NOT set on Earth!
July 26th, 2006 at 11:41 am
Hi all. Someone pointed me to this Blog (I wasn’t searching for myself!!). The thin moon was a real toughie and I was close to giving up – moreso because I’d only had 2hrs sleep the night before. However, my best slice so far is 22h45m which you can see here…
http://www.digitalsky.org.uk/20050607/youngmoon.html
The thin Moon on LPOD was the last in a sequence of daylight shots I was taking as an experiment with the SKYnyx camera. The ability to adjust the contrast and brightness with a live histogram is really helpful in bringing out the Moon against a bright sky. The other shots take prior to this one can be seen here…
http://www.digitalsky.org.uk/l2006/lunarphases_july_2006-fullsize.jpg
Thanks for all your comments,
Pete Lawrence
July 26th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
“Give it a read– you might want to try for a young Moon sometime yourself!”
But isn’t the picture here of a very old Moon. Boy, can’t believe I am the first to catch that
Rob
July 26th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
Hale_bopp
Only by a short time, my friend. I can’t post here from work, so I had to wait until the evening – otherwise you wouldn’t have been the first to catch it.
July 26th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Moonflake said:
“(JRR Tolkien made this mistake in LOTR).”
Well, he may have made it once, but if so it was one that slipped through the net. In fact, he spent weeks trying to get the different story threads to match up in terms of timing, particularly with respect to the phases of the moon.
July 26th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Elwood Herring said:
“To be fair to Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings was NOT set on Earth!”
Well, it was intended to be, but an Earth before we spoilt it. This is why all the flora and most of the fauna are things familiar to us. He first invented Middle-Earth because he was trying to restore a mythology (for which read oral tradition) to England that had been lost as a result of the Norman conquest in 1066. The Normans actively suppressed the Anglo-Saxon language, and required all official documents to be in Norman French.
Tolkien’s earliest stories eventually became The Silmarillion, after passing through many incarnations. LOTR was initially conceived as a sequel to The Hobbit in the same kind of vein, but it grew in the telling to something quite different. It contains many references to events described in The Silmarillion and is set in the same world. Which is England, but told via a postulated mythic tradition.
July 26th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Nigel – Yes, I am aware of all that, but when all is said and done it is a work of fiction, and if it can include wizards and dragons and a plethora of imaginary creatures along with a totally invented landscape (i.e. the mountains of Mordor) I think a small matter of a discrepancy in lunar phases can be overlooked. For all we know, in Tolkien’s “Third Age” of Middle Earth there may well have been a 25 or even 20 day Lunar cycle!
(btw I live just a stone’s throw from the place that inspired Tolkien in the first place, so maybe I’m descended from a Hobbit…)
July 26th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
I actually woke up before dawn on the 23rd and saw the moon (and lovely venus within 15°) the image there says 24th so the observer in England saw it 18 hours after I saw it and I was amazed at how thin the crescent was on Sunday. My photograph or the pair also turned out quite well.
Moon phases are very often messed up in art, movies and the like, I often like to analyze images of the moon plug them into Redshift and see if the phase was correct. One game that had an interesting feature was Zelda Windwaker where the phase of the moon was used to indicate changes in time and the environment changed accordingly.
July 26th, 2006 at 7:53 pm
My personal best for seeing the young moon was 13 hr. 40 min. I even got a mention in Sky & Telescope magazine.
This just missed the old record by 12 minutes which was, oddly enough, set just
12 minutes earlier by Robert Victor in Lansing, Michigan.
This blew past the previous record by an hour or so, back in May of 1989.
July 26th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
I’m lucky to see a moon that’s two days from being new!
I love seeing the moon get thinner and thinner. And seeing it after it has passed the new moon phase is also a fave of mine. I’m often in awe of the site of the crescent moon with the sun “below” it at sunset.
July 26th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
Along these lines, way back in May I posted:
…in the late ’80s I was in Disneyland. We always try to eat dinner at the “Blue Bayou†restaurant (the only quasi-nice place in the park). For those of you who have never been there, it is set up like the back veranda of a southern mansion in the antebellum south and you are having a late evening dinner. The illusion is pretty complete with the heat and humidity higher than normal for indoors, frog and cricket sound effects, and fireflies (artificial, of course) flitting about in the bushes separating you from the river where folks just starting the “Pirates of the Caribbean†ride drift by.
To complete the illusion, there is a setting crescent moon on the horizon, about four or five days old. There was something subconsciously bothering me about this all through dinner until I realized that the wrong face of the moon was lit. The horns of the crescent were pointing to the horizon rather than away from it. To my wife’s supreme embarrassment, I pointed this out to our waitress (after 25 years these “nerd moments†still bother her). However, the next time we were at the park, about 5 years later, I noticed that the moon had been fixed! It was now a waxing gibbous, maybe 10 days old, and the correct face was lit up. Of course, with that phase just setting, that means we were eating dinner at about 4 AM, but, to my wife’s infinite relief, I let this little subtlety slide.
- Jack
July 27th, 2006 at 4:40 am
okay, so maybe LOTR was a bad example
September 13th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
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