Comments on: A slice of Moon

By: Visibility of neew moon - Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum

Visibility of neew moon - Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 05:08:01 +0000

[...] Bad Astronomy Blog: A slice of Moon Quote: [...]

By: moonflake

moonflake — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 11:40:51 +0000

okay, so maybe LOTR was a bad example

By: Jack Hagerty

Jack Hagerty — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 04:32:41 +0000

Along these lines, way back in May I posted:

…in the late â€™80s I was in Disneyland. We always try to eat dinner at the â€œBlue Bayouâ€ 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 â€œPirates of the Caribbeanâ€ 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 wifeâ€™s supreme embarrassment, I pointed this out to our waitress (after 25 years these â€œnerd momentsâ€ 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 wifeâ€™s infinite relief, I let this little subtlety slide.

- Jack

By: Grand Lunar

Grand Lunar — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 03:27:13 +0000

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.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:53:08 +0000

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.

By: Troy

Troy — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 00:17:26 +0000

I actually woke up before dawn on the 23rd and saw the moon (and lovely venus within 15Â°) 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.

By: Elwood Herring

Elwood Herring — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:59:44 +0000

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…)