NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Seeing Moon rising an setting ?
From: Marcel Tschudin
Date: 2010 Feb 18, 18:53 +0200
From: Marcel Tschudin
Date: 2010 Feb 18, 18:53 +0200
The thread on "An assumption about the moon" reminded me on an other question related with the moon which I have in my mind already for quite some time: Is it actually possible for an observer at low altitudes to see a moonrise or moonset at the apparent horizon ? Rough estimations which I made some years ago suggested that the extinction by the mass of atmosphere would be so high that this shouldn't be possible. The estimation suggested that around 1� altitude the extinction would be greater than the brightness of the moon. I saw this supposedly confirmed when watching moonsets over the Marmara-Sea here in the Istanbul area where the (full) moon just dimmed out when approaching the horizon. I am however not sure whether this was only due to a "dirty" atmosphere (haze/smog). The Internet provides some photos of the moon at landscape horizons but there the altitude of that landscape horizon is not known. There are also photos from the heavily flattened moon which astronauts took from space through parts of the atmosphere. However in those photos the light of the moon is likely not to pass the densest lowest part of the atmosphere which there is probably only a very thin stripe over the earth surface. Do some of you who are occasionally at sea remember having actually been able to clearly see a moonrise or moonset at the sea horizon? Marcel