NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2022 Feb 11, 11:05 -0800
Last night I stepped out around local midnight. In the west I was looking at the Orion North Arrow and above it the gibbous Moon. It was quite striking how nicely the horns of the Moon were aligned with the axis of the North Arrow --as they should be! The Moon's horns point nearly to the poles of the ecliptic, which are 23.5° away from the celestial poles (Polaris in the north). But when the Moon is near Taurus-Gemini, as it was last night, or Scorpius-Sagittarius, the two types of poles are nearly aligned so a line through the horns point north and south. The image, created with Stellarium, illustrates the view last night. I've included standard Dec and RA (equiv. to SHA) coordinates, and also the ecliptic line. I've also magnified the Moon by a factor of four (a built-in feature in Stellarium) to make the alignment easier to see.
Frank Reed
