Friday, September 30, 2016

Black moon tonight

Anticipating the black moon tonight I just now looked at the sky and saw this.
And you know what that means. No black moon for you!

What a bummer. 

And the thing about a black moon is you can't see it anyway. It's blacked out. So how am I going to get a picture of that, even on a cloudless night? Huh? What would be the point?
Pffft.

It's worth a try anyway just to see what we don't see.

I looked at a dozen pages, and goodness, these astrophysicists do go on. They'll tell you everything about the phases of the moon, about eclipses, about timetables, about how many times rare things happen, about different types of black moons, about the difference between harvest moon, and blue moons, and solstices, and the difference between Western Hemisphere and Eastern Hemisphere and the differences about Northern and Southern hemisphere. They'll tell you everything except the specific thing that you ask them, "what time is best to see the black moon tonight?" They appear to be gleeful in explaining why it's not worth the bother. 

Except this one site is fun. An article on Bustle.com How to "see" the moon on Sept. 30, 2016, because this new moon is quite unusual.

Very straightforward, this page. The homepage shows it's a site for girls.

The black moon page tells us, as if girlsplaining without all the extra useless technical crap:

* Seeing this black moon is a lot easier than you might think.
* The word see in put in parentheses because you don't actually see it.
* It's basically a new moon all shadowed over so not reflecting back any light to us.
* It's not super rare but it is still a little bit unusual.
* How to see it? Look up at night.
* 1) Get yourself to the Western Hemisphere.
* 2) Go outside at the right time. (Finally!)
* The official moment is 8:11 p.m. EST.
* It will be the same thing pretty much all night.
* 3) Look up.
* 4) Behold! A gaping hole where the moon should be. Quake and tremble in fear.

Sounds like a blowout. But let's see. Come on, be a sport. Let's go outside with our cameras, even our little cell phones and let's see what see, or don't see.