This all reminds me of a scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Harry Bailey and his beloved are out in the middle of the night, or so it seems while following the plot, but there’s a beautiful full moon on the horizon, which only happens at the beginning or end of the night.
In Niven’s Ringworld, he has the protagonist, Louis Wu, teleporting around the world eastward to keep celebrating his birthday by keeping ahead of midnight in the first edition. This is corrected to westward in later editions.
You don’t have to teleport to keep up with the earth’s rotation – a passenger jet could do it, but you’d have to be pretty far up north – beyond about 60 degrees. That’s about the latitude of Whitehorse in Canada’s Yukon. In mid-latitudes – to take as an example where I live – the surface of the earth rotates at more than 750 mph. The speed of sound at around 35,000 ft at typical temperatures is around 660 mph. So a pretty fast jet would come close, but no cigar – you’d need to go supersonic. What makes it worse is that at most NH latitudes, prevailing jet streams generally slow you down with respect to ground speed when westbound, so you’d need to up your airspeed even more.
Or another one: In one of the Harry Potter books, he’s taking an exam for his astronomy class, and is observing Venus at midnight.
But things like that don’t bother me. Or rather, they do, a little, sort of like an annoying itch. But they don’t REALLY bother me.
On the other hand…
I remember one time when I was sitting outside, and some folks walking past asked me what I was looking at. “The stars”, I replied. “Oh, are the stars out?”, they asked, without even looking up. People like that, or the woman in @Qadgop_the_Mercotan 's tale who didn’t know it was even possible to predict moonrise, they scare me.
The fact that the moons phases in some way correlate with when they can be seen during the night is not particularly interesting astronomy for high school or college, and I don’t ever recall, even in say 5th grade where it might be interesting enough, learning exactly how they correlate. I could work it out with enough time, but I haven’t had the exact correlations pushed into my head in a way that I would be taken out of a story by the wrong time of night being used with a phase of the moon. It’s simply of absolutely no use in anyone’s life.
That said, if I was writing fiction, I would probably try to get it correct, but the fact is that I’ve always had an absolutely terrible time trying to get into the mindset of writing fiction, so I probably am not a good one to talk to about how an average fiction writer would be sure that what he’s writing about is possible.
Additionally, unless there are clues from other astronomical facts presented in the work of fiction, it’s always possible that the astronomy of the world being presented simply isn’t the same as the astronomy of the real world. It doesn’t matter how many things are presented as identical to the real world, the fact that the story didn’t happen means the world is at least in some ways different than our own, and so any number of things might actually work differently.
I like to do some amateur astronomy but nothing too serious. However, I once served as a scout leader where one of the requirements for scouts to earn tenderfoot level was knowing a few ways to tell directions without using a compass. When I had to teach it was when the moon and sun relations really sunk in for me. Some of the ways are the sun is due east on the morning of the equinox, and the full moon is directly south at midnight once a month. Understanding those two points led to a lot of follow up discussions with the scouts, but I don’t think I ever mentioned waning and waxing moons.
That’s much more poetic.
I was on a beach near the equator on a clear evening with a clear view of 95% of the sky. A woman from Montreal asked why she was able to see the moon from Montreal, but had not seen it while in Barbados. I told her that if she were in Montreal this evening, she would not see the moon, but she would just assume it was behind a building, cloud, or hill. In this case, the moon was almost “new” and would not become visible in the evening for 3-4 days.
On another occasion on Cape Cod, I was asked if I knew what time high tide was. I could see the moon was at first quarter and said, “Based on the moon, I’d say about 2pm.” He didn’t know that the moon’s phase was a determining factor for the time of high/low tide. (In Buzzard’s Bay, full/new moon high tides are around 8 am/pm. Quarter moon high tides are around 2 am/pm.)
- It doesn’t have any connection.
- Detailed knowledge of the Moon is not indicative of intellectual curiosity.
At the end of the day, knowing everything is pretty impossible so, even if you’re curious, you’re going to have some significant gaps. I couldn’t tell you a thing about the sports schedule, I do know about the raid on the offices of the Indian newspaper, The Wire, despite having no connection to India, I do know that the Moon is tidally locked with the Earth and reflects the light of the Sun, I couldn’t tell you what the prostate actually does beyond sometimes getting enlarged, and I do know the connection between Slavic Shamanism and Norse Mythology.
I spend nearly all my time learning and I don’t know most things. I’m fairly comfortable with that. There’s still time before I die and I hope to know several times more at that time than I do now, but I’ll still die not knowing the grand majority of everything that there is to know.
I think most laymen could tell you that the Moon is reflecting sunlight, and could probably name the phases of the moon like “Crescent, Half Moon, Gibbous Moon, Full Moon”. In Canada we learned that in grade school science, and the terms are common enough that people hear them regularly.
The dynamics of where, when and how the phases change and when you can see them is entirely different. I’m betting there are serious space enthusiasts who could not tell you that a waning crescent moon can only be seen before daylight without giving it somr serious thought.
I know quite a bit of astronomy. I took a full year astro course in college, and I’m a hobby astrophotographer, especally lunar photography. I keep up with the literature and read astrophysics papers for fun. I have several telescopes including an 8" Celestron on a tracking mount with dedicated astro cameras. And I had to stop and think about the ‘waning crescent moon’ thing for a minute. It’s just something that rarely comes up even when doing detailed astronomy stuff.
Could you explain why?
That must be a Southern Hemisphere version of thevsong, if “grab hold of the hollow” means what I think (and it looks like the Cowboy Junkies song has them in the other order).
this is a waxing moon in the SH (even though the emoji label is boreocentric)
I doubt that bolded one, very much. In Canada, maybe, but in general, nope.
In the same way that a full moon will be, more or less, directly opposite the Sun in the sky (rising at sunset, and setting at sunrise), a new moon will be, more or less, in the same location as the Sun in the sky, and rising and setting at about the same time as the Sun.
Each night between the full moon and the new moon, the moon rises later in the evening, and appears to move closer to the Sun in the sky.
A “waning crescent” moon would occur just a few days before the new moon, and thus, would appear to be fairly close to the Sun, and have its nightly “rise” close to dawn.
Thank you. Now I just have to picture that in my head, and I’ll get it, but it may take a while.
Hah, I must have reversed it then. See, even in knowing, I don’t know!
So, wait, is it different in the southern hemisphere?
It’s why I have no problem seeing the Moon Rabbit, for one thing, because no convolutions and accessories are needed like for the Asian one, it looks like an ordinary rabbit bounding around.
I guess @Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus can add that to the list…
Thanks.
An easier (for me) way to remember is that the moon waxes and wanes from right to left, such that it’s waxing when the right side is lit and waning when it’s dark (left to right in Southern Hemisphere).