Libration accounts for much if not all the variation in exactly which “half” of the moon’s surface we can see. Given that the moon’s distance from Earth is about 26 times as great as the latter’s diameter, I wouldn’t expect to see much difference with a twelve or fifteen degree change in latitude.
OTOH I would expect that from much of the southern hemisphere the moon appears upside down as compared to its appearance in Europe or North America.
Well, it’ll appear rotated 12° more than you’re used to. Probably not that noticeable for the casual viewer.
I can’t see any man in the moon even if I look for it. Of course, I have lousy eyesight anyway.
Usually I look for the Sea of Tranquility, because I can remember going out on July 20, 1969, looking up, and my dad saying “There are people walking around up there.”
Regards,
Shodan
While I have heard of the expression “the man in the moon” I’ve never heard that this is supposed to be a face. The only “explanation” I’ve heard has to do with a children’s story about an old man who lives on the moon and something about burning himself on cold porridge.
I can see the classic face. I can also see two different rabbits (one sitting, one running), an old man carrying a bundle of sticks, and a milkmaid carrying two buckets of milk on a yoke.
Sort of…
Between how the moon looks at my latitude, and somewhat poor vision on my part, it always looked like more of a grimacing death’s-head to me.
I saw men on the moon during the Apollo landings. Other than that, no.
Never on the actual real moon. Occasionally in pictures where the moon is bigger in my field of vision, but only in situations where that’s the point of the picture and I’ve been primed to look for it. I see nothing in everyday moon pictures, either.
That’s not correct. The light is not ‘bent’ by the atmosphere, and the moon looking larger has nothing to do with the atmosphere at all, but rather with proximity to ground objects which give us a point of comparison.
The moon is redder at the horizon because the atmosphere is full of particles that scatter blue light. When the moon is overhead, you aren’t loolking through much atmosphere - by 18,000 ft the atmosphere is only half as dense, and by 36,000 feet only a quarter as dense. So light from the moon only really gets affected by maybe 10 miles of atmosphere or so, and the majority of the dust and other particles will be in the first few miles. But when it’s nearer the horizon are looking through many miles of high density atmosphere.
If you ever do lunar photography, you can really see the effect of the atmosphere on what you are seeing. Images that are crisp and sharp even at 2000mm focal length are just wavy blurs when the moon is 30 degrees or lower in the sky.
That first picture in the gallery, with the yellow moon, is the first time I have ever seen anything looking like a face in the moon.
When I can’t see the man in the moon, I know it’s time to get my prescription updated.
Eyeglass prescription. 
While this explanation is frequently repeated, I don’t buy it. It doesn’t explain why the moon illusion appears when the moon sets over the ocean, where there are no nearby objects for comparison. I think a better explanation is that people don’t think of the sky as a hemisphere, but as a flattened bowl so the horizon seems farther away than the zenith.
Oh yes, a beautiful film. I think it’s the first thing I can recall seeing RW in and it was obvious she is something special.
In any event, an actual measure of the Moon’s angular size (holding up a comparison object at arm’s length, or taking photographs at the same zoom level, or whatever) will give the same result when the Moon is close to the horizon or high overhead.
I agree that it’s because the sky is viewed as a flattened dome (i.e., flatter than a hemisphere), and I think that the illusion of a flattened dome, in turn, is because of clouds: Clouds near the horizon really are further away than clouds near the zenith.
I think you mean it will be 12 degrees lower in the sky than I’m used to since I’m 12 degrees farther from the tropics? But there should also be some very slight changes to north-south libration, as a result of which I’m seeing a very slight smidgin more of the region about one lunar pole, and that much less about the other, than I would have seen in Escondido on the same night.
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I can’t imagine how that happened.
Having checked the settings, I see that it was marked “Moderate”, which is the default, but now I’ve changed it to “Safe”. Would you mind looking at it again and letting me know what it says now?
Of course, Flickr also thinks one of our cats is a dog. Either a dog, or some “other” kind of animal.
**The man in the moon; can you see him?
**
*Nobody * can see the Man in the Moon. Not Nobody, not nohow. Even I have never seen him!
Actually, some people see a Crab in the Moon:
Just a final note, if any is needed – refracvtion Does take place at the horizon, but it can’t explain the apparently larger size of the moon there. That is a perception illusion, unrelated to any sort of lensing. as Chronos points out (and as anyone who wants to can check), the angular size of the moon is the same near the horizon as it is high in the sky. It really does seem to result (as has been pointed out, and as you can see illustrated in M. Minnaert’s classic book The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air) from people’s expectation that the “dome” of the sky is not really hemispherical, but “flattened”.
Yeah, I’ve never seen the man in the moon, and I can’t even begin to figure out where it’s supposed to be in that picture. I kind of see what looks like a three-dimensional block of cheese in it, but nothing that I can identify as a face.
No, no, there’s a rotation. Your head is not pointing in the same direction, so the moon you see is twisted. The rabbit is upside down for some, not for others. Mind you, in that video, Greg Quicke describes a ~180-degree rotation; I expected about 90 because there isn’t a 180-degree difference in latitude between the U.K. and Australia.
The amount of rotation depends on what time you’re looking at it (time relative to the Moon, that is; how far it is from rising or setting). If you’re comparing at the time when it’s highest in the sky (moon noon, if you will), then it will indeed be a 180º rotation between anywhere north and anywhere south.