April 9

12:25 AM Can anybody understand the Moon?

That is. Why sometimes is big and bright and sometimes is like cut in half or just a parenthesis.

I did not until recently. I mean, maybe 10-20 years ago. In the later part of my life.

They call them phases of the Moon. The Moon appears in the sky like a ball of stone illuminated by the Sun. Because the Moon rotates around Earth (the only true part of the geocentric system before Copernicus). The only planet that rotates around Earth. Rest of them including Earth rotate around Sun.

As seen in the video above. Earth rotates around self 365-6 times while it rotates around Sun once. Moon rotates around Earth every 29.5 days. Earth's rotation angle is tilted at 23 degree, hence the season (some rotating parts are illuminated more than others six months of the year)

Can see from the video above. When Moon is farthest to the Sun or aligned with Sun and Earth on the far side of it, it is fully illuminated. However, the plane of the Moon rotation is tilted some 5 degrees from the plane of Earth rotation around Sun.

Because of that, when Moon is aligned with Earth on the far side it cannot be eclipsed by (in the shadow of) Earth except in a few narrow periods called nodes. Same when Moon is aligned with Sun and Earth on the closest point to the Sun, it cannot create eclipses except in the nodes and not always or every year.

If the plane of Moon rotation was the same as the plane of Earth rotation around Sun, we would get eclipses every month. A Moon one and a Sun one. Though they come in a position pretty close when new or full. Within up to 5 degrees that is.

By dividing 365.4 to 29.5 we get 12.38 or the number of months. Of course the noun month in English comes from Moon. However, it is a bit more than that. How much more? 0.38 months or 11 days. So the calendar needed corrections, otherwise the months would not coincide with seasons, and after 30 years March would fall in fall time etc..

First calendars where of course Moon calendars. It was much easier to count new moons or full moons than days within a year. Why would earliest civilizations need a calendar. Simple. Because they needed to know when to sow.

In Northern Hemisphere sowing time was critical and the ever drifting lunar calendar would not work. So they learned to build structures like Stonehenge.

When the shadow of the center pillar reached a certain stone at dawn, they knew is was time to sow. I won't get into the details of it, it's quite a bit of astronomy and geometry. They didn't know that, it was a process of trial and error and of course they tried at lower scales first. Bored already? Watch a video or read a poem.

Just figured. It is no joke. 23% of the young women have their cycle synced with the Full Moon while being fertile at the middle of the cycle or @New Moon, or during the darkest of nights. Anybody can guess why? So they can go unseen and have sex with people other than their own tribe, for increasing gene pool.

Though they were no noises upstairs  tonight, i forgot why i started this post (entry whatever) so i will continue when i remember.

Nevermind, i remembered (and forgot again) but i'm too tired, bored and pissed and out of diet caffein free soda. I go to smoke a cigarette (second or third or better said first of the day (it's past midnight), i am addicted already).

2:05 Ok i haven't smoked yet by i decided how to finish this. First. I am not so much tired as my eyes hurt for having the ozone generator on for many hours the night before.

I will never forget the night of the 1977 earthquake. I was at Iași, after a week of being in bed with a cold. I went outside and met with one colleague and a teacher (class master) who came from home in the area where we were living to see how we were doing?

We walked on the streets like many others and i looked at the sky and saw a full moon among some fluffy clouds that today i learnt are associated with low atmospheric pressure ahead of a storm. According to Stellarium, Moon was close to Earth.

Three of the conditions met according to my theories. One more could have been heavy machinery cause in Romania at that time we did not have freeways and it was late in the evening anyways. A few trains heavily loaded braking simultaneously in the area above the epicenter? (at that time trains in Romania were going up to 120 kmh).