NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2020 Jul 14, 09:30 -0700
David Pike,
You wrote regarding David C's photo in this message:
"However, maybe I'm a bit dim, but I can't work out why the Moon is round. We're approaching neaps in the UK."
It's simply over-exposed. It's difficult to get a photo of the Moon that shows its features and phase and a sharp limb when the camera's exposure (an "auto" setting?) is set for the broader field of view.
You mentioned "neaps". Neap tides around the North Sea occur a couple of days after First Quarter and Last Quarter. The offset is different in other parts of the world. A delay of one day is typical, which means that most locations had their neap-iest neap tides yesterday. When talking about the Moon's phase, it's safer to stick with the actual phase, or the elongation angle (the Moon-Sun lunar distance).
Frank Reed
PS: Your message had a technical problem which delayed it. While it is possible to "paste" images into NavList messages from the system clipboard, this is not a good idea for anything bigger than a postage stamp (let's say, anything bigger than 100 pixels in each dimension). If you want to add a local image to a NavList message, please use the normal "Add Images & Files" function.