Waning crescent moon.
I used to read to my children at bedtime. It was one of the greatest pleasures in my life and one of my few regrets when it came to an end. (Not because they outgrew it but because I could no longer stay awake. I’d gotten a manual labor job in 2002, when my younger one was in first grade, installing office furniture. I’d read a few pages then start to babble, then begin to snore. At first it would amuse them. After a few months they lost patience and I lost one of the coolest jobs in the world.)
Too often we’d be reading a story and there’d be an illustration of the kid in the story being put to bed with an image of the moon framed in the window, and it was a waning quarter or crescent. Is nobody complaining about these irresponsible parents tucking in their child at about 4 AM?
You see, a moon that looks like the letter C is rising just before dawn. It’s waning: that is, it’s going to totally disappear from the night sky for a few days before it shows up again at sunset as a waxing crescent, where it more or less resembles the curve in the letter D.
I don’t have a very high regard for the natural world knowledge of designers, illustrators, and art directors. What they care about, and what they do really well—the focus of their skill—is to make it look good on the page. They see many things that affect us but we are not conscious of. But it seems very few of them know any more about the natural world than the rest of us.
But then it struck me: what if the illustrator was Australian? Would the moon be the same down there? As much as I hated to do so, I had to cut the art department a little slack while I thought about this.
My spacial sense is pretty good but I could not wrap my mind around how a person would experience the moon in the southern hemisphere. Would the moon rise on the right or the left as you faced the equator? Would it be the same letter C just before dawn? Or would it be the curve of a D?
In the past couple of years I’ve made a few online acquaintances via soundcloud.com. If I were a more modern person I might have been able to google the question and, probably, have had it answered years ago. But, I’m old and slow witted and should be hanging under a tree by my fingertips collecting moss.…It turns out that no one in Australia pays any more attention to the phases of the moon than we do up here (everyone gives me a blank stare when I mention the subject). They couldn’t answer my question.
Since when have the phases of the moon become the sole provenance of science? Don’t you think poets and musicians should know these things? We only notice the full moon so we can howl at it?
A few days ago I discovered I’ve gained googling skills. Suddenly I feel thirty years younger, or maybe even forty years younger (fifty years is pushing the plausibility of literacy, though some almost six-year olds can read and write, and google).
One of the reasons I had trouble visualizing all this is how our maps are oriented. When we look at the arc of the sun or moon we’re facing the equator, and facing south. They rise on our left and set on our right. But in the southern hemisphere, when someone follows the arc of sun and moon by facing the equator they face north, just like they would when using a map: the orbs rise on the right and set on the left. I couldn’t flip the map in my mind.
So, to answer the question: that photo could be of a waxing crescent as seen from the southern hemisphere and the parents might even be putting the kid to bed a little too early.
The Naked Old Man 
It’s a Different Moon, Down There
Posted in Book commentary, Memoire, Natural world with tags children's books, phases of the moon northern versus southern hemispheres, slow wits on May 18, 2013 by swampmessiahWaning crescent moon.
I used to read to my children at bedtime. It was one of the greatest pleasures in my life and one of my few regrets when it came to an end. (Not because they outgrew it but because I could no longer stay awake. I’d gotten a manual labor job in 2002, when my younger one was in first grade, installing office furniture. I’d read a few pages then start to babble, then begin to snore. At first it would amuse them. After a few months they lost patience and I lost one of the coolest jobs in the world.)
Too often we’d be reading a story and there’d be an illustration of the kid in the story being put to bed with an image of the moon framed in the window, and it was a waning quarter or crescent. Is nobody complaining about these irresponsible parents tucking in their child at about 4 AM?
You see, a moon that looks like the letter C is rising just before dawn. It’s waning: that is, it’s going to totally disappear from the night sky for a few days before it shows up again at sunset as a waxing crescent, where it more or less resembles the curve in the letter D.
I don’t have a very high regard for the natural world knowledge of designers, illustrators, and art directors. What they care about, and what they do really well—the focus of their skill—is to make it look good on the page. They see many things that affect us but we are not conscious of. But it seems very few of them know any more about the natural world than the rest of us.
But then it struck me: what if the illustrator was Australian? Would the moon be the same down there? As much as I hated to do so, I had to cut the art department a little slack while I thought about this.
My spacial sense is pretty good but I could not wrap my mind around how a person would experience the moon in the southern hemisphere. Would the moon rise on the right or the left as you faced the equator? Would it be the same letter C just before dawn? Or would it be the curve of a D?
In the past couple of years I’ve made a few online acquaintances via soundcloud.com. If I were a more modern person I might have been able to google the question and, probably, have had it answered years ago. But, I’m old and slow witted and should be hanging under a tree by my fingertips collecting moss.…It turns out that no one in Australia pays any more attention to the phases of the moon than we do up here (everyone gives me a blank stare when I mention the subject). They couldn’t answer my question.
Since when have the phases of the moon become the sole provenance of science? Don’t you think poets and musicians should know these things? We only notice the full moon so we can howl at it?
A few days ago I discovered I’ve gained googling skills. Suddenly I feel thirty years younger, or maybe even forty years younger (fifty years is pushing the plausibility of literacy, though some almost six-year olds can read and write, and google).
One of the reasons I had trouble visualizing all this is how our maps are oriented. When we look at the arc of the sun or moon we’re facing the equator, and facing south. They rise on our left and set on our right. But in the southern hemisphere, when someone follows the arc of sun and moon by facing the equator they face north, just like they would when using a map: the orbs rise on the right and set on the left. I couldn’t flip the map in my mind.
So, to answer the question: that photo could be of a waxing crescent as seen from the southern hemisphere and the parents might even be putting the kid to bed a little too early.
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