Re: Moon hopping around?

jmfbahciv@xxxxxxx wrote:

"Edward Green" <spamspamspam3@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<...>

That was written in 2005, so we are on the other side of this event,
but the moon is still jumping. _That's_ something I didn't notice
through my casual observations of "huh... moon". I didn't know about
the 18.6 year lunar cycle, the inclination of the lunar orbit, the
precession, the swings in declination. I didn't know squat diddly.
This is _great_ :-)

Yes. Bless you. Another mystery ticked off my list.

It was an odd coincidence. A few days before the subject post, I had
indeed looked at the moon at been surprised to see it there and then.
It was the hour (I had seen it less than 12 hours ago, setting...
shouldn't it still be asleep now?), not the location, but maybe the
location made some unconscious impression on me. It was very
northerly. As it turns out from further reading... it _was_ very
northerly, based on an 18.6 year cycle. The impression was amplified
by a skewed idea of north in the vicinity of Manhattan: the island, and
its north-south streets, actually almost 30 degrees N/NE -- a
misorientation which I now see, checking the map, is even greater for
the "north/south" streets in my part of Brooklyn. So, rising in the
late afternoon, the moon appeared to be _extremely_ north, relative to
the local street grid.

According to the previously cited page, the variation in declination --
I take it N/S of west, is also in the neighborhood of 30 degrees: so in
New York geometry, the moon was setting almost exactly due west, but
rising 60 degrees north of apparent east.

Maybe _that's_ what first grabbed the attention of my unconscious... I
saw it set in the west that morning; how the heck did it get all the
way north like that? And what's it doing there at all? It's possible
to go for years without being jolted out of the New York compass sense.
And all this, as I said, was heightened by the near coincidence of the
full moon with the equinox -- we had a bright orb executing these
improbable manuevers. That was essentially a once in a lifetime event.
Occasionally the natural world penetrates even the urb.

.

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