Our Companion, the Moon

Since the moon always sets at dawn when it's a full moon, this one, that I was watching, definitely was a full moon on all accounts. The logic of full, half and new moons is actually pretty simple once you take some time to have a think about it; provided you have some time to spare for the moon. I have heard someone call moon-watching a mere Stone-Age pastime. There's some certainty, though, that watching the moon was more than a pastime for Stone-Age beholders with less than primary-school attendance.

(Microsoft Media)

Strange, though, to call it "a" full moon taken that it's always the same good old moon that it already was in the Stone Age and even earlier. And there's a lot that is earlier, a whole lot earlier, than just the Stone Age that might have been only yesterday in geological terms. I can already hear someone telling me that, oh no, yesterday were the dinosaurs. All right, I won't argue about these time scales. In particular since it was the same moon for the dinosaurs, too.

On top of that, if dawn means daybreak then naturally you'd assume that day breaks when it begins to become bright, and that is some time before the first bits of the sun show up on the horizon - opposite the full moon, provided it isn't overcast or cloudy.

Following Yahoo Dictionary, dawn is the "time each morning at which daylight first begins". So the moon really sets "at" dawn and not "before". The moon takes roughly four weeks - more or less which is probably why we keep having to adjust the length of our Earth year, the calendars (Roman, Julian, Gregorian) and try and avoid leap-year errors - around our home planet in the seeming opposite direction to the sun.

So, look at that. What do we have here? The full moon sets at dawn. The sun shows up at about that time and is opposite the moon. We don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to come to the conclusion that, in order to be full, the moon needs to be face to face with the sun from an Earth perspective to appear like a complete shiny disk in the sky. From other vantage points it may always be, or at different times.

After the sun has finally risen - and could, in theory, be gazed at for enjoyment or closer inspection, too, if it weren't so prohibitively glaring - the moon would have to be expected to not be visible any longer, because it would already have disappeared beyond and below the horizon if it still wanted to be called a full moon, though by that time seen from somewhere that it hasn't set yet.

You may be forgiven for saying that when it's a half-moon for us, an entire half, pardon the pun, of its surface would still be under the sun; it's just: we can't see that particular half completely from Earth. You'd be right; and it's exactly what is meant.

When we call it a half-moon, what we see is actually the seemingly two-dimensional half of one half of its three-dimensional surface. Yes, it really is a three-dimensional surface simply because the moon's is as little a flat plane as our Earth's was once thought to be with the sun hovering over it.

(Microsoft Media)

And if Mother Earth is in between and casts her shadow over the entire surface of the moon that's facing her, we've got a lunar eclipse. And if the beholder isn't even on the planet, which would call for the perspective to be somewhere between Earth and the sun, then it wouldn't just be the shadow preventing a closer inspection of the lunar surface - it would be Earth's full bulk.

In case you are wondering why the moon (or should it even be the Moon with a capital M) is a neuter "it" - in spite of all its influence on Mother Earth (as seen e.g. in the tide) and (more importantly for its, well, gender) its presence in ancient mythology, stories, fables, and tales - here's some lexicology:
   
In German, and therefore also in Old English, the moon is and was male (Mond and mona respectively are at least grammatically male), in French it is female (la lune), but this looks and sounds a little different orthographically, phonetically and anyway.

It would appear the story of the Man in the Moon isn't convincing enough any longer to justify the moon's maleness. The fact that the moon is less of a mythological entity these days - perhaps since mankind landed on it ("one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind") - may account for it to be seen as nothing more than an Earth satellite, a piece of rock (even full of useful minerals and metals waiting to be mined), a planetoid at best.

In short: the moon's a thing much like an asteroid or the now degraded Pluto that's currently called a dwarf planet to spare it (!) the shame of being just a piece of rock, most likely having drifted off the asteroid belt at some stage.

(Microsoft Media)

In spite of its or his gender, of whether there is an elusive man on the moon who may keep escaping modern detection technology, or of whether the moon is just Earth's rocky satellite - or call it an attendant, a companion or even an accomplice, because that's the meaning of the Latin word "satelles" - spinning around Earth from west to east, the moon is always a bit further to the east from day to day (the 24-hour ones) when you look at it at the same time of day (the bright part) or night (the more or less dark part of the 24-hour day).

It might pay to have a separate word for either kind of day, like e.g. in the Scandinavian languages. We can, of course, tell them apart by saying "full day" and "daylight", or we might adopt yet another Greek word for it, tongue-twisting much like "ophthalmologist": nycthemeron, which simply means "night'n'day", "hemera" being the day part of this compound.

For all it's wandering around Earth (careful here, though, since the wandering could make it eligible for being a planet which is also Greek meaning "wanderer"), the moon cannot possibly stay full for too long. Seen from Earth, its position towards the sun changes as it moves around us. If you are confused now, let's recap:

The Earth spins west to east, too, like the moon which was most likely born out of Earth anyway, some time, long ago, due to an impact of sorts (with Mars perhaps, as one theory goes, very early on in the history of our solar system). This collision quarried out a huge terrestrial chunk that kept rotating like Mother Earth. The Moon is Earth's child, much like all the planets were born from what became our sun in due course.

Now, with both Earth spinning from west to east (taking, yes, it's true, 24 hours for one rotation) - which is why we see the sun seemingly rise on the eastern horizon while in fact we are every morning turning towards it - and the moon dashing over and past any given point on Earth in the same direction (taking, as we already know, about four weeks for one cycle, and meaning it is not geostationary like many of our artificial and highly technological satellites - and if that sounds Greek to you, then that's ok), the moon is less and less lit by the sun, seen from where we are, until it becomes a new moon turning its back on the sun while not necessarily standing in between us and the sun.

(Microsoft Media)

When it does block the sun completely or partially, it creates a full or partial solar eclipse, but that doesn't happen every month. And the moon, though being so tiny, can only achieve this feat of eclipsing the sun, that's so much bigger even than Earth, because it is so much closer to where we are. Coincidentally, the moon also rotates around itself, but that hasn't got any effect on eclipsing the sun or turning around Earth. And it does so in a way that makes the same spots on its surface always look at Earth.

And after being a new and invisible moon (invisible, that is, on most occasions other than during a solar eclipse when it's in front of the solar disk and should be treated with due caution in case you'd like to have a closer look at that eclipse), those parts of the surface of the moon facing us gradually become more and more lit on their way to the next full moon. Unless there's a solar eclipse on the moon with Earth standing in between.

This should pretty much sum up what we learnt, or should have learnt, at school. Though if our teacher had presented it in such a long-winded and at the same time concise way, there'd have been no surprise if we still hadn't been able to understand it after our school finals.

At the same time, and in fact all the time, our sun sits tight at the centre of our solar system - which is why it's called the solar system in the first place, nowadays that we know that Earth is neither flat nor at the centre of the universe - and it turns around itself, our sun does; just around itself, or herself, not around Earth, and yes, the sun shouldn't be "it" either.

In Old English, and therefore in German, it was, and is, female, sunne and Sonne respectively. And you might have guessed it, yes, in French it's male (le soleil). Talk about differences in outlook. At least when it comes to Mother Earth, she's a she in German (Erde), in Old English (eorðe), and even in French (la terre).

And if you miss the letters eth (ð) and thorn (þ) in today's English: they were done away with long ago by Norman-French monks who simply didn't like them. They simply chose "th" for either of them, whether voiced or not, much like the Romans had once transliterated Greek aspirated consonants, as opposed to non-aspirated ones, with two Latin letters, namely: kh, ph, rh and th; just think of rhapsody, philosophy, orthography and ophthalmology.

Let's quietly add, for the sake of completeness, that our sun - and all of us turning around it - is also spinning around the centre of our galaxy. So much for it or her being a fixed star.