http://vimeo.com/markg/fullmoonsilhouettes
dave boling
I just caught this. What an amazingly beautiful vid. The motion of the moon is caught in realtime – it’s not time lapse at all.
When my DH and I were in our 20s he was telling me that the full moon always rises the same time as when the sun sets. I said “Nah! No way!”
So he took me up to the top of a hill that was in the middle of a large grassy field. The field was big enough that you could get an unobstructed view of the horizon in both directions. The sun went down and nothing happened. I thought “See, I told you so.” Then…this glow appeared in the east…
Just one of many times he has heard me say the delightful sentence “Wow, you were right and I was wrong!!”
Music to his ears, no doubt.
Sun down, full moon up. It was a very dramatic phenomenon and the view from that hill is probably the clearest I’ve ever seen it.
It can be useful (for more than being aware that the full moon rises when the sun sets) to know the celestial mechanics of the moon orbit. It doesn’t take much to be useful - once I arrived with some colleagues at an unknown town after dark (by airplane), and I found the right direction to walk simply by watching the moon, deducing where the sun must be, and then with the help of a watch figuring out where north and south must be. None of the other guys had thought of that and believed we were lost. It’s surprisingly many who don’t know though - just watch all the cartoons of a night scene where the moon is drawn with the sunny side pointing slightly upwards. Most people don’t see what’s wrong with the picture even if you ask them.
Edit: Yes, the moon navigation incident happened some ten years ago, before every mobile phone got a GPS and a satnav program.. the world is a more boing place now in many ways. ![]()
-Tor