A waning gibbous Moon

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Donning the Hairsplitter’s Hat (an irritating piece of headgear for both user and observer), I feel I must point out that your front-page picture of the Moon on Saturday was not in fact a full Moon.

To be astronomically precise, the photo by Carol Chan missed the bus by quite some hours — 16 hours and 40 minutes, as a matter of fact.

I hate to pour cold water on a blue Moon (an impossibly difficult feat of course!), but the actual time of the full Moon was 1.35pm on August 31.

The picture, therefore, is not of a full Moon, but of a waning gibbous Moon.

Splitting hairs to a lunatic degree, those photographers gathered on Wainui Beach for moonrise on the evening of the 31st would also have been late.

With full Moon occurring that afternoon, during daylight, they too would have missed the bus, or boat, figuratively speaking!

For those who may be interested, there has been a quiet competition going on for a few years among sky photographers keen to capture the earliest new Moon.

The current holder of this celestial honour has managed to capture the very slenderest sliver of a new Moon — a mere handful of pixels of reflected sunlight striking the Moon’s surface as it re-emerges from Earth’s shadow.

Moon madness manifests itself in many wondrous ways!

Roger Handford