APOD: Find the New Moon (2022 Jul 25)

[Astronymus]

Easy to find on an Eizo screen.

[johnnydeep]

Start from the black buoy in the water, go straight up halfway to the height of the sky that you can see in this image. And go a little to the right. There is is, the new Moon.

Beautiful image!

Ann

Yes, it is, and thank you for your help; I'd not have found it without your directions. That said, there are two small dark "spots" on the image that may puzzle folks (they puzzled me). They are located about a third of the way up the sky and to the left of the buoy. Any idea what they might be?

I think they are birds.

Ann

Yeah, me too. Zooming in close, the left most one has wings. Either that or it's really Saturn

[BobStein-VisiBone]

"Even though the Moon is above your horizon half of the time"

is incorrect. depends on the phase, time of year and location

How so?

In December in the Northern Hemisphere, the full moon is above the horizon more than half of each day. Similar to the sun in summer. Though the moon can be a little more extreme because it can wander further from the equator than the sun.

I think autumn last quarter moon is above the horizon more than half each day, and spring first quarter, but I may have those reversed.

Anything on the ecliptic (sun, moon, planet) spends extra time above our horizon when it's on the high point of the ecliptic. For the Northern Hemisphere the high point is near Taurus/Gemini/Orion. For the Southern Hemisphere the high point is in Sagittarius.

[Chris Peterson]

"Even though the Moon is above your horizon half of the time"

is incorrect. depends on the phase, time of year and location

How so?

In December in the Northern Hemisphere, the full moon is above the horizon more than half of each day. Similar to the sun in summer. Though the moon can be a little more extreme because it can wander further from the equator than the sun.

I think autumn last quarter moon is above the horizon more than half each day, and spring first quarter, but I may have those reversed.

Yeah, but the claim wasn't that the Moon is in the sky half of the day. The statement wasn't incorrect.

[MarkBour]

An example of why we often use pseudocolor palettes when trying to get more out of an image. I've converted the original to grayscale and then applied a common pseudocolor mapping used for astronomical images. It results in an image that lets our eyes see more detail than would otherwise be apparent.
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ds9.jpeg

A pair of stars emerge, too, to Sun's side of Moon
I wonder if they are planets
new moon and stars.jpg

Yes, it is, and thank you for your help; I'd not have found it without your directions. That said, there are two small dark "spots" on the image that may puzzle folks (they puzzled me). They are located about a third of the way up the sky and to the left of the buoy. Any idea what they might be?

I think they are birds.

Ann

Yeah, me too. Zooming in close, the left most one has wings. Either that or it's really Saturn

I believe that the spots Victor pointed out in Chris' pseudo-color version are the same dark spots in the original that smitty, johnnydeep, and Ann are talking about. Victor, as to your question, though, I went to Stellarium online. Lord, we live in an age of informational convenience!

Capture.png

Stellarium and Google maps helped me understand a few things quickly:
Because Sant Marti D'Empuries is on the east coast of Spain, the view of
the Sun just below the water horizon must be looking east, so this must
be just before sunrise, not just after sunset.

From the APOD info and what others noted, I set the date+time so that
locally to the observation it was 5am May 28. This is what it showed.
(I had "landscape" turned off, so you can see the Sun, you have to use
the 0 azimuth line as the horizon.)


There's not much it had between the Sun and the Moon. Just the Pleaides, Mercury, and Uranus. But both Mercury and the Pleaides seem to be too close to the Sun to be candidates for these spots.

I have to agree with the conclusion that they were just birds, or at least something in our own atmosphere.