Where (and when) will the moon come up?

16/03/10 6:21 am by Angela. Filed under: Math & Science, Photos

I posted a few weeks ago with links and instructions for figuring out where the sun will go down. While in Hawaii I wanted to take some moonrise shots, so did some research on how to do the same sort of thing for the moon.

One major difference here is that while the sun moves (in relation to the horizon, and in relation to time) very little from one day to another, the moon comes up about an hour later each day. That seemed wierd to me at first, but when you think about it, a lunar month is 28 days, and there are 24 hours in the day, so I guess it makes sense. Unless I completely don’t get it at all and that’s a coincidence, which is possible.

In any case:

  1. first find the moonrise data for your location here
  2. on the results page, choose “rise/set time/azimuth” for Columns and click Show
  3. note the moonrise (or set) time and azimuth for your date
  4. use the information from the Where will the sun go down? post to visualize this on a map and then calculate it in person.

If you plan to do this repeatedly, it might be handy to have a table of moonrise/set times for an entire year, which you can get here.

The map part is harder–that map is for a solar calculator and therefore doesn’t play automatically populate moon azimuths (azimi?). But, it can be approximated by fudging the numbers, and the rest of the instructions (related to using a compass) work the same way.

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