NavList:

Get yourself a photo of moonrise with an interesting foreground, and social media praise will follow! It's an easy game to play.

Here's an example from today's local newspaper in southeastern Connecticut, "The Day" of New London. For NavList's celestial navigation enthusiasts, there's a fair amount of "angular" fun in this photo. First, what is the angular size of the Moon? That you can look up. Having set an angular scale, can you determine the distance to those foreground buildings based on likely sizes of common architectural features like windows and doors? Since there's no beach in front of the houses, could you also determine height of eye, at least within some reasonable limits? And how far away are those boats? A related question: why is the second boat sinking?! Also, within some crude limits, can you determine your latitude? Is there any other information that can be extracted from the image without assuming in advance where the photo was taken?

You can read a little background on the photo here.

Frank Reed

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