Things you were shockingly old when you learned

TIL that sometimes doctors use maggots to treat wounds

and leeches are great for taking down traumatic bruising!

Yesterday, after being interested in the moon for about 50 years, I learned that the direction of moonrise varies about 30 degrees or so depending on when in the month it is. The full moon rises due east, then moonrise wanders south of east, new moon is due east, then wanders north, repeat. How have I never noticed this?

not gonna lie, i barely pay attention to where the new moon rises.

I am an 80s music stan so my main association with the new moon is "New Moon on Monday."

xp apparently neither have I, but this week the full moon rose behind the hills to the east and then a few nights later moonrise came in the other window over the city, I thought I was losing my mind.

does the moon swing around the other way in the southern hemisphere? i think it will if its orbit is anywhere near Equatorial

nah I think if it's rising on the south side of east wouldn't that be the case wherever you were?

but if it's on the same plane as the sun (which it is because eclipses) basically above the equator, then it'd look to be south from the northern hemisphere and to be north from the southern hemisphere. east/west aspect would be the same but it'd appear to arc in the other direction...

um, must be a site where you can put in your location and see what the sky looks lik...

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/night/australia/sydney

yeah, it does

in a similar vein, it wasn't many years ago when i realised that the day / night balance on the equator must be almost 50/50

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/sri-lanka/kandy

vs, say, tromso

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/tromso

I hope the moon is behaving itself. Any suspicious behaviour and those wacky North Americans might well start accusing it of being a PRC spy satellite!

time for the moon to launch a sneak attack imo

https://www.indy100.com/news/us-navy-venus-spy-balloon-2659371853

does the moon swing around the other way in the southern hemisphere? i think it will if its orbit is anywhere near Equatorial

― koogs, Sunday, February 12, 2023 11:04 PM

The shockingly dumb way I learned this: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/22/8087847/simpsons-southern-hemisphere

Also, I've been there, and the whole damn sky is upside-down.

the only time i visited sydney i couldn't figure out why my mental map was all wrong - i kept on thinking the coast was in the opposite direction. eventually realised the sun was in the wrong half of the sky.

in other shockingly old news, i learned the other day that 'game and watch' was a game and... a watch! i thought it meant you er watched the game. i never owned one btw.

You never owned a watch?

I mean, you can be forgiven for that seeing as that form factor is hardly close to the modern concept of a watch

It wasn't until living in the same house for a decade and walking the dog at night that I noticed that full moon would rise over the same spot. Then I noticed when there were planets in the sky, along with the moon, they all formed an arc that more-or-less I could visualize as a ring around Earth, like Saturn. And that gave me a sense of where I was standing on the globe, looking out at that plane passing through the equator.

thinking about it, the galactic plane and the equator aren't aligned. that's why we have tropics, the 23ish degree axis tilt.

https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2018-11/TheMoonsOrientation.jpg

still freaks me out

not to scale

And both sides claim to see a man in the moon, which i don't see at all.

xp What I take from that is if you wish to view the moon from the Northern Hemisphere, you are supposed to be wearing a dress. Probably it's a good idea to be at least fifty thousand feet tall.

Life pro tip: if you are fifty thousand feet tall and you're wearing a dress, put on some bike shorts or something.

there is no right side up of the moon, really

Near side, far side, we’re all in the same gang.

and there is no 'dark side' of the moon, right? just a side that we can't see from the ground, but it's not like it's shrouded in darkness 24/7

That's true yeah, we can only see about 55% of the moon's surface from earth, the other side permanently faces away. And although the track of the sun and the moon is on the northern half of the sky here in the southern hemisphere, it doesn't make things flip north-south. South America is still south of North America even when you're in the southern hemisphere. A ship sailing south continues to sail south when it crosses the equator. The moon does not orbit in the same plane as the sun, otherwise there would be total eclipses every month. It's angled at 23° to the sun's plane / ecliptic just like the earth's axis of rotation. Sometimes it's south of the ecliptic, sometimes it's north of the ecliptic.
The argument about which is "top" and "bottom" of the moon, or whether the horns point left or right when you're looking at a waxing crescent, is explained in the diagram above. But rising slightly south of east is slightly south of east wherever you are on earth.

the bottom of the moon is clearly the point that's nearest the earth

even lacking an atmosphere the moon does rotate doesn't it. so the idea of a dark side of the moon being a permanent quality is just a matter of perspective or momentary happenstance. Seems like at one point people thought there was a specific light/dark breakdown of the moon surface one permanently in one condition one in the other. But if that did happen it is before a less terracentric view of the universe came about.

And both sides claim to see a man in the moon, which i don't see at all.

― pplains, Monday, February 13, 2023 8:33 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I just got back from Sri Lanka. They often draw a rabbit in the moon and I could totally see it while I was out there.

I just learnt that watermelons and pumpkins are part of the same fruit family.

and bloody cucumbers, all of them mess me up

would you believe
they put a rabbit the moon

> even lacking an atmosphere the moon does rotate doesn't it.

it's gravity locked to earth so the same side always faces us. meaning we only see one side. but the other side isn't 'dark' as such, it gets as much light as the side we see (moon days are 14 earth days iirc)

the rabbit thing was on QI, along with some people seeing marge simpson.

If you believe

They put a Marge on the moon

(With apologies to mookieproof)

Does a rabbit have a specific status in Indonesian lore or anything?
Trickster deity or anything? I think they do elsewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rabbit

https://ahseeit.com//king-include/uploads/2021/01/69564895_879912042392288_6093823431670762695_n-3924907461.jpg

profit war
grown up men discussing the merit of billboard hot 100 pop music

I'm being followed by a moon rabbit, moon rabbit, moon rabbit.

what the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_the_Moon#/media/File:Man_In_The_Moon2.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_the_Moon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nXrjWe3tR8

月のうさぎ

can a mod turn all of CerebralCosplay's posts into a pic of Balthazar Getty from Lost Highway.

TIL that sometimes doctors use maggots to treat wounds

― waiting for a czar to fall (Neanderthal), Sunday, February 12, 2023 1:38 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol, I just randomly learned this yesterday from a kids book about houseflies that I read to my daughter