What is the Moon doing in January? |
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The Moon in January |
In general, we can tell what the Moon will look like, when it will be visible, and in what direction to look for it, just by working out how many days it is since New Moon. The details are here. But we can predict this more accurately by noticing that the Moon mimics, every month, the way the Sun behaves over the course of a whole year.
Immediately after New Moon, the crescent Moon behaves like the Sun in spring. It's moving northwards; the time of moonrise doesn't change much from one day to the next, but the time of moonset gets later every evening, and it sets further right along the horizon each night. As the Moon waxes through gibbous, it reaches its northernmost point, and it's behaving like the Sun at midsummer, in June: the Moon rises in the north-east as the Sun sets in the south-west, and it stays above the horizon all through the long hours of darkness, setting in the north-west at sunrise. As it reaches Full and then starts to wane, the Moon is moving southwards again, like the Sun in autumn; moonset doesn't change much from one morning to the next, but moonrise gets much later every night, and it shifts from the north-eastern point on the horizon towards south-east. After Last Quarter, we can only glimpse the waning Moon at sunrise, coming up in the south-east. It behaves like the midwinter Sun, barely showing over the horizon; since the Sun itself is starting to climb north again, we lose sight of the Moon some days before New Moon.
On any date, if you know how many days it is since New Moon:
multiply that by twelve, and add it to the present date, to find out
roughly where the Moon will be in its cycle.
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