New Moon (or lack thereof)
Monday, December 10th, 2007 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manToday is ראש חודש. When was the last time you saw a new moon? I honestly can't remember. A two or three-day old crescent moon, yes, but not a genuinely new moon, thin as a nail paring (as Sam puts it in LotR). I don't even know what one looks like; how thin a crescent one would see. (You'd need to be very lucky, I reckon (i.e. know exactly where and when to look), to one as thin as this. It's been my ambition for a little while to see the new moon, but each month I either forget or it's cloudy or I'm somewhere where I can't see the western horizon.
Today it was 50% overcast, but the clouds were rolling past pretty fast, and I determined to make this the day I saw the new moon. I left work around sunset, and cast a few glances at the western sky on the way home, but decided the western horizon was probably too brightly lit to see anything. Arriving at a park with a clear view westwards about twenty-five minutes after sunset, I determined to stop and wait for either the sky to fade enough, or the clouds to part.
And I waited, and I waited, and I waited; and I got colder, and colder, and colder, despite garbing up from my original long-sleeved top, to vest, vest-top and shirt besides, plus an extra layer of socks.
Eventually, forty minutes later, I gave up, defeated by the cold. And went home and looked up the time of moonset online. According to timeanddate.com, it was roughly at the same time as sunset (in fact, it had it two minutes earlier, which makes no sense, but possibly the site isn't entirely accurate).
This makes no sense to me; since the astronomical new moon was actually yesterday at 5:40pm (i.e. after moonset as viewed from London (and Jerusalem)); so you'd have thought that moonset ought to be 22/24 hours ÷ 29.5 days × 24 hours = 45 minutes later than sunset (as it was at that time yesterday). I also can't see how a moon setting that early could possibly be visible.
So, nu, folks; what am I missing?
Today it was 50% overcast, but the clouds were rolling past pretty fast, and I determined to make this the day I saw the new moon. I left work around sunset, and cast a few glances at the western sky on the way home, but decided the western horizon was probably too brightly lit to see anything. Arriving at a park with a clear view westwards about twenty-five minutes after sunset, I determined to stop and wait for either the sky to fade enough, or the clouds to part.
And I waited, and I waited, and I waited; and I got colder, and colder, and colder, despite garbing up from my original long-sleeved top, to vest, vest-top and shirt besides, plus an extra layer of socks.
Eventually, forty minutes later, I gave up, defeated by the cold. And went home and looked up the time of moonset online. According to timeanddate.com, it was roughly at the same time as sunset (in fact, it had it two minutes earlier, which makes no sense, but possibly the site isn't entirely accurate).
This makes no sense to me; since the astronomical new moon was actually yesterday at 5:40pm (i.e. after moonset as viewed from London (and Jerusalem)); so you'd have thought that moonset ought to be 22/24 hours ÷ 29.5 days × 24 hours = 45 minutes later than sunset (as it was at that time yesterday). I also can't see how a moon setting that early could possibly be visible.
So, nu, folks; what am I missing?
