Starship Asterisk*

Find the Moon

Explanation: Where's the Moon? Somewhere in this image, the Earth's Moon is hiding. The entire Moon is visible, in its completely full phase, in plain sight. Even the photographer's keen eye couldn't find it even though he knew exactly where to look -- only the long exposure of his camera picked it up -- barely. Although by now you might be congratulating yourself on finding it, why was it so difficult to see? For one reason, this photograph was taken during a total lunar eclipse, when the Earth's shadow made the Moon much dimmer than a normal full Moon. For another, the image, taken in Colorado, USA, was captured just before sunrise. With the Moon on the exact opposite side of the sky from the Sun, this meant that the Sun was just below the horizon, but still slightly illuminating the sky. Last, as the Moon was only about two degrees above the horizon, the large volume of air between the camera and the horizon scattered a lot of light away from the background Moon. Twelve minutes after this image was acquired in 2012, the Sun peeked over the horizon and the Moon set.

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Beautiful image. The Moon is as nebulous and ethereal as a dream.

And yet it is so substantial!

Ann

Oddly, the Moon's disk is quite large in the picture - but very faint. It took me a careful scan of the enlarged image to find it: just right of the frame centre. The lower limb, above the slight bulge in the skyline, is more obvious than the rest of the disk.

https://vecta.io/symbols/198/symbols-ge ... rge-square

If you look VERY carefully, you can see a cat in the picture above. The cat is black, it was taken in a coal celler at midnight and the photographer's flash gun failed. Just thought you would like to know the technical details of this most interesting photograph.

John

Hard to see; but it is there!


Poor kitty; no one at it's B=day party!

This is exactly what we experience during the last lunar eclipse, in my case it happened during sunset, as I was in Jakarta, Indonesia.

We being astronomy enthusiasts, knew exactly where to look though at first we couldn't see, until I (being the only one wearing no glasses) pinpointed the exact location. It looks exactly like this photo.

My other non-astronomy-enthusiasts friends however couldn't find it at all and thought the sky was cloudy. Actually it was crystal clear.

I found it, although I have to admit that I had to read the description to see what I was looking for before I did. As soon as I read that I was looking for an eclipsed Moon, I scrolled back up and saw it immediately. I was also surprised by how large the disc was in the image. I was thinking it was going to be much smaller.

Utterly failed to spot it. I blame reflections on my laptop display All I could see was the much bigger very blurry and very obvious whitish disk (what is that exactly anyway?) and the much smaller white crescent just peeking over the trees on the left (and within the big blurry disk) - what's that?

With a little vignette, the moon appears much more obvious. I'm curious about the optical effect in this APOD? And the teaser in its horizon.

Ann wrote: ↑Sun Jul 11, 2021 4:43 am Beautiful image. The Moon is as nebulous and ethereal as a dream.

And yet it is so substantial!

Ann

A really apt description Ann!

Eric