February 10, 2020 The Azimuth of the Moon

I woke up early on Saturday morning and looked out the front door to see what the moon was up to. It was as nearly full and the night sky was clear – what a beautiful sight! I ran to get my camera and went out in my slippers on that cold morning to get a photo of the setting moon, sure it was going to be a photographic masterpiece. Think National Geographic. Here’s what I actually got:

It literally looks like a circle of white paper fell on a piece of black paper. That really cracked me up. My eyes could see the coloration markings of the moon, but the camera could not. I fiddled around with the shutter speed and came up with these:

I like them better, but don’t think I’m ready to submit my work to National Geographic yet.

My enthusiasm for the moon led me to put an app on my phone called Moon Calendar Pro. Now at my fingertips, I can look at any day of the year and see what time the moon rises and sets, when the sun rises and sets, the phase of the moon every day, and if that weren’t enough, it also tells me at every minute of the day what the azimuth and the elevation of both the sun and moon are. Truly exciting stuff, even though I had no idea what those two terms meant. They were accompanied with a cool graphic, which also meant nothing to me. Ah, technology. Gotta love it. Fortunately, I know my way around the interwebs and quickly found out just what kind of rich descriptive words I had been granted upon getting that app.

I’m not going to tell you. Look it up – I had to! And when you’ve looked it up, you and I can have very advanced erudite conversation together. I’m looking forward to it.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning, when the moon’s azimuth is 259.1 degrees and its elevation is 21.1 degrees. Brownie points to the person who can figure out when that is. Ready, set…go!