The Sun is up during the day, when it is bright out, and the moon is up during the night, when we need it for the light it provides.
I’ve known that a full moon rises and sets opposite the Sun as long as I can remember. If I thought about it for a second, I’d know that a crescent moon is going to be either high in the sky or under the horizon at sunrise or sunset, but I’d have to spend a considerable time deciding if it is the waxing or waning phase, and I’d probably had a 40% chance of getting it wrong.
That said, I know plenty of otherwise educated people who wouldn’t even know where to start. I’ve heard that the full moon is always directly overhead, that the moon has a light side and a dark side, that a solar eclipse is when the moon comes between the Earth and the Sun (correct), and that a lunar eclipse is when the Sun comes between the Earth and the Moon (wildly incorrect).
Maybe, I blame the Jetsons. I remember an episode where there was a sign that marked the transition from the light side to the dark side. I only remember that because, even at the time, I knew that was incorrect.
Heck, I have an Astronomy degree and I didn’t know offhand about particular times when waxing/waning/full rise or set in the sky. That said, due to electives and coursework, the Earth’s moon was never even mentioned, it was all other planets and moons, stars, and cosmology.
I’ve explained to my mom at least once a year that moon phases are not from the earth’s shadow, and no the “supermoon” event in the newspaper is not going to fill up the whole sky.
I know that you can tell whether a crescent moon is waxing or waning by the shape. If the crescent makes a C, then it’s waning. If it would fill the belly of a capital D, then it’s waxing.
He did not say “due East”. Most of the year the generalization is good enough.
I wouldn’t know about the “waning crescent moon”, but I would know about the full Moon “rising at Midnite”. You can even sometimes see the Moon during the day.
I do know the terms like “waxing gibbous”- which I always thought sounds vaguely Lovecraftian.
Those stupid nicknames they give on news feeds like “Wolf moon” etc, slightly piss me off.
I only know due to some song lyrics: Reach out to the crescent moon, grab hold of the hollow If she sits on the palm of your right, that moon will be fuller tomorrow If she sits on the palm of your left, that moon is on the wane…
I took an astronomy class in college and did well but we never discussed correlation between lunar phases and times the moon appears in the sky. It’s the sort of thing I’d think is neat and probably (sorta) remember if I saw it mentioned in a space documentary but holds no day to day relevance for me.
For the real dyed-in-the-wool lunatics out there, here is a website that discusses the moon-phase in Tolkien’s LOTR. https://shire-reckoning.com/moon.html
Tolkien rewrote The Lord of the Rings extensively in order to try to get this right, and he still made several mistakes. This might be forgiven in some instances, since he seems to have used a layman’s interpretation of the term New Moon, rather than the meaning used by astronomers.
What really bothers me is when you can see stars in the unlit portion of the moon. For even more aneurysm points, have the moon pass in front of the clouds.
I must admit to being a dyed-in-the-wool lunatic myself, since I spotted the problem with the waning crescent Moon straight away.
I also recognised that the full Moon rises somewhere near sunset, but the Moon’s orbit is significantly tilted with respect to the ecliptic, so there is a lot of variation throughout the year. Not to mention the effects of refraction due to the Earth’s atmosphere, which add a touch of randomness into the mix.
And in the summer, at higher latitudes in the northern hemisphere the sun clearly rises in the northeast and sets in the northwest, thus spending part of the day in the northern part of the sky, contrary to intuitive expectations that in the northern hemisphere the sun is always in the southern part of the sky.
For me, it was more that I don’t think I ever heard that piece of astronomical knowledge, but once the idea that the full moon rises at sunset because it’s exactly opposite the sun was understood, the rest sort of fell into place naturally.
But it’s the sort of thing that someone either has to really think about, or that someone has to specifically tell them. Few people are just going to realize that without either of those situations being true.
