When I walked the dogs this morning, around 4:30 AM, there was a beautiful new moon hanging just above the mountains that form our northern horizon. Our skies have been quite hazy for the past week or so, mainly from dilute smoke from the fires far north of us. This haze gave the new moon a slightly yellow cast, but didn't really hide any detail. The sky surrounding the moon was just barely brighter than the black of the rest of the sky; the moon is still separated from the sun by a large enough angle to put it in the night sky. Probably tomorrow morning it will not be framed by the black of night, but rather by the brightening sky of morning...
Meanwhile, Debbie and I enjoyed several things about this new moon: its large apparent size (an illusion caused by its proximity to the horizon), the very bright “earthshine” (the dark portion of the moon being illuminated by light reflected from the Earth), the moon's appearance much further north than we usually see it (because it's summertime), and the beautiful contrast of the new moon against the almost-black night sky...
No comments:
Post a Comment