A year full of Young Moons!
A lunar month is the duration between two successive new moons and is also known as a synodic month with a mean period of 29.53 days. A new moon is always between the sun and the earth for any particular month and rises and sets with the sun and travels across the sun in close proximity.
At new moon, the sun, Earth, and moon are aligned in space, with the moon in the middle. The dark side of the moon or moon’s night side directly faces us making it invisible during a new moon phase.
Some people use the term new moon for a thin crescent moon visible in the west after sunset. We can always see these little crescents shortly after the sunset, a day or two after each month’s new moon when they are termed as waxing crescents. Astronomers call these little crescent new moons as young moons.
Background story: I embarked on a journey at the start of this year (2023) to capture each new moon (young moon) which was a tough ask given the amount of dust pollution over the horizons and cloudy weather during monsoon season in summers from Lahore, Pakistan. I had been chasing the thinnest of Crescents for almost more than 2 years, each time trying to better my own record of capturing the least illuminated moon as it is one of those exercises that tests not only your knowledge about the horizon, twilight and the ecliptic but most importantly your patience. I was able to capture most of the visible young moons with the youngest crescent being 22 hours old at 1% illumination.
EXIF:
All images taken during twilight period shortly after sunset with Samyang 135mm f/2.2 lens attached to Canon 1300D.
All images were cropped with same resolution without any derotation or resize.
Each moon image is a single image with post processing done in Photoshop.
This collage was also created with the help of Photoshop 2023.
Image can be accessed at astrobin by the following link.
https://www.astrobin.com/l0ydue/