Moon Watch

Over recent years, I’ve made several attempts to photograph the moon and it’s been an interesting exercise.

What I confirm from my small collection is confirmation that we only ever see the same side of the moon. The moon rotates at the same rate as it orbits the earth so the same side always faces us. The only reason it looks different is because different areas of the face are illuminated by the sun as it orbits. I think I know this but I forget.

I’ve tried to put these in sequence order – picked out dates from the image data. And this gives me a little record of my attempts.

Waxing Crescent Moon – 4 January 2017@ 18.21 hrs

First Quarter Moon – 10 June 2019 @ 17.10 hrs

Full Moon – 6 October 2015 @ 20.50 hrs

Waxing Gibbous Moon – 4 September 2023 @ 22.08 hrs

I always think that ‘waxing gibbous’ sounds like an ailing primate. Gibbous is word that I’ve never heard of in any other context. Looked it up – it means ‘convex or protuberant’ from the Latin noun gibbus meaning hump.

A couple of different images to finish off.

Waxing Crescent Moon with Venus (bottom right) and Mars (top) – 22 February 2023 @ 18.31 hrs

And then an eclipse of the sun. I was really lucky to be able to shoot this because of the cloud cover such that the eclipse was visible via the LiveView on my camera screen without me looking directly towards the sun. So the dark circle over the sun is indeed the moon.