More Nerdy Stuff

A Great Photo Op

Last winter when I was still working at the Casino Theater, a building that overlooks St. Simons Sound, I happened to witness an amazing scene. The sun had just set behind the new Sidney Lanier suspension bridge and the crescent moon was also hanging low in the brilliant blue winter sky as it set a few minutes behind the sun.

The scene was absolutely breathtaking—an award winning photo opportunity, but my Cannon G3 digital camera was resting comfortably in my office at home.

I have kicked myself in the ass for the past ten months about missing that photo that night, but I also have spent the time since figuring out how to predict when the sunset/sunrise moonset/moonrise will closely coincide. The Moon Phase graphic I post here on the Blog is an outgrowth of these efforts.

Several additional viewing opportunities have passed this summer having been obscured by clouds, but I have some good news about next week…

On October 3rd, 4th, and possibly 5th the crescent moon and sun will be back in position. I got this data from The US Naval Observatory website. If you want to do your own predictions for your location, what you do is enter your city/state or your latitude/longitude in the appropriate form and it prints out a twelve-month table of any time period you request. Then you go into the charts and find the dates when the sun and moon are doing what you want to see.

It’s my opinion that you want the sun setting fifteen to thirty minutes before the moon so that the sky has darkened enough to highlight the moon. You might also get to see a phenomena called “Earthshine” that involves light being reflected from the daylight part of the Earth back onto the darkened part of the moon.

The effect can be quite striking.

So any way, all of you folks here on the eastern coast of the US and in an area running up toward North Carolina and Washington DC need to be paying attention this weekend and early next week.

Take your girl out guys (or visa-versa,) buy yourselves a bottle of wine, pick out a good vantage point, and hope that the weather agrees with you and you might see something you’ve never seen before.

I’ll let you know how things go down here. If we wash out this time, I’m going to modify my predictions and try again later this winter.

Wish me luck…