When does the moon rise?
October 8th, 2006 at 06:18am
On the whole, I consider myself to have a pretty good general knowledge, certainly not enough to ever be a contender on television quiz shows like Temptation (aka Sale of the Century), but pretty good none the less. And for that very reason, there are questions I occasionally find myself asking which I think I really should know…things which seem incredibly basic, but are probably known by very few people.
For example, last night around 6:50pm as Nattie and I were walking past the intersection of Ballumbir St and Ainslie Avenue, I noticed that the moon was rising over Mount Ainslie, it was a lovely clear night and I was disappointed that I didn’t have the camera with me. So I thought that it would be a good idea to take a photo tonight…and then it dawned (hmmm, no pun intended) on me…how long does the moon stay “up” for? And when does it rise again? Is it remotely similar to the sun cycle? How does it work?
I felt quite silly not knowing this seemingly basic information, but I thought about it for a while and realised that with the moon being up during the day, the information couldn’t be as easily understood as I thought. With this in mind, and knowing that I wanted to get a photo of the moon rising over Mount Ainslie, I set about finding out when the moon rises next.
I typed “moonrise” into Google and landed on Geocience Australia’s “Compute Moonrise & Moonset Times” page, and after entering my location found that the moon will rise tomorrow at 7:40pm…I then checked the accuracy of the page by asking it when the moon was scheduled to rise today, and it informed me that the moon should have risen at 6:24pm, which sounds about right considering that I can’t see the horizon from my location and it therefore took about half an hour for the moon to get over Mount Ainslie!
So, with that mystery solved, I now intend on taking a few photos of moonrise tonight…I have identified a spot with a nice, clear unobstructed view of the moonrise location…a spot which is out of the way of traffic and passers by, and should be quite good!
Samuel
Entry Filed under: Samuel News
