Starship Asterisk*

MountainJim wrote:My calendar indicated last month had a Black Moon (2nd New Moon) on 9/30/16. Was the last new moon on 9/30 or 10/01?

Steve Dutch wrote:The only time you can "see" a truly full moon is during a central lunar eclipse, where the center of the moon passes through the center of the earth's shadow. This is about the closest you can get and still have the moon visible. In principle there should be a very slender shaded sector on the limb opposite the shadow.

Chris Peterson wrote:
And the only time you can "see" a truly new moon is during a total solar eclipse.

heehaw wrote:
before Galileo and the telescope, there is only one (1) drawing of the Moon, and that a mere scribble. How come? The Man in the Moon is clearly and easily visible to the naked eye! Well, I have a theory! Before Galileo there were no eyeglasses. All the old Professors had lost the vision of their youth, and their memories, if any, of seeing the Man in the Moon. And when asked about it by young people, they chastised those poor young people for not knowing that all celestial was perfect; all below is tainted; the Moon was necessarily without ragged flaws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_the_Moon wrote:
<<There are various explanations for how the Man in the Moon came to be.

A longstanding European tradition holds that the man was banished to the moon for some crime. Christian lore commonly held that he is the man caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath and sentenced by God to death by stoning in the book of Numbers XV.32-36. Some Germanic cultures thought he was a man caught stealing from a neighbor's hedgerow to repair his own. There is a Roman legend that he is a sheep-thief.

One medieval Christian tradition claims him as Cain, the Wanderer, forever doomed to circle the Earth. Dante's Inferno alludes to this:

• For now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine
  On either hemisphere, touching the wave
  Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight
  The moon was round.

This is mentioned again in his Paradise:

• But tell, I pray thee, whence the gloomy spots
  Upon this body, which below on earth
  Give rise to talk of Cain in fabling quaint?

There is also a Talmudic tradition that the image of Jacob is engraved on the moon,[4] although no such mention appears in the Torah.

John Lyly says in the prologue to his Endymion (1591), "There liveth none under the sunne, that knows what to make of the man in the moone."

In Norse mythology, Máni is the male personification of the moon who crosses the sky in a horse-drawn carriage. He is continually pursued by the Great Wolf Hati who catches him at Ragnarok. The name Máni simply means "Moon".

In Chinese mythology, the goddess Chang'e is stranded upon the moon after foolishly consuming a double dose of an immortality potion. She is accompanied by a small group of moon rabbits.

In Haida mythology, the figure represents a boy gathering sticks. The boy's father had told him the moon's light would brighten the night, allowing the chore to be completed. Not wanting to gather sticks, the boy complained and ridiculed the moon. As punishment for his disrespect, the boy was taken from earth and trapped on the moon.>>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasses wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]Dominican Cardinal and renowned biblical scholar Hugh of Saint-Cher painted by Tommaso da Modena (1352)[/color][/b]

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<<The first eyeglasses were made in Italy in about 1286, but it is not clear who the inventor was. In a sermon delivered on February 23, 1306, the Dominican friar Giordano da Pisa (ca. 1255–1311) wrote "It is not yet twenty years since there was found the art of making eyeglasses, which make for good vision... And it is so short a time that this new art, never before extant, was discovered. ... I saw the one who first discovered and practiced it, and I talked to him." Giordano's colleague Friar Alessandro della Spina of Pisa (d. 1313) was soon making eyeglasses. The Ancient Chronicle of the Dominican Monastery of St. Catherine in Pisa records: "Eyeglasses, having first been made by someone else, who was unwilling to share them, he [Spina] made them and shared them with everyone with a cheerful and willing heart." By 1301, there were guild regulations in Venice governing the sale of eyeglasses.

The earliest pictorial evidence for the use of eyeglasses is Tommaso da Modena's 1352 portrait of the cardinal Hugh de Provence reading in a scriptorium. Another early example would be a depiction of eyeglasses found north of the Alps in an altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen, Germany, in 1403.

These early glasses had convex lenses that could correct both hyperopia (farsightedness), and the presbyopia that commonly develops as a symptom of aging. It was not until 1604 that Johannes Kepler published the first correct explanation as to why convex and concave lenses could correct presbyopia and myopia.

Early frames for glasses consisted of two magnifying glasses riveted together by the handles so that they could grip the nose. These are referred to as "rivet spectacles". The earliest surviving examples were found under the floorboards at Kloster Wienhausen, a convent near Celle in Germany; they have been dated to circa 1400.>>

Chris Peterson wrote:

Steve Dutch wrote:The only time you can "see" a truly full moon is during a central lunar eclipse, where the center of the moon passes through the center of the earth's shadow. This is about the closest you can get and still have the moon visible. In principle there should be a very slender shaded sector on the limb opposite the shadow.

And the only time you can "see" a truly new moon is during a total solar eclipse.

That said, I believe that both the new and the full moon are defined by the moment of least illumination and the moment of greatest illumination, not by 0% or 100% illumination.

heehaw wrote:Aren't we lucky that the dark features on the Moon are clustered on the side toward us, to make the Moon so interesting to look at! ...