I live in Australia and when the moon isn’t full it always appears to fill up from the bottom up. So a new moon looks like a croissant with the curved side facing down. But on northern hemisphere flags like Turkey for example it appears as a croissant standing up with the curve facing left. Does the moon appear to wax and wane from top to bottom or left to right in different parts of the world?
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I struggled with this for a bit and then came up with a thought experiment for it. I’m a northern hemisphere person, you’ll have to reverse this. Imagine that a particular time of night the moon is due south of you. Start walking toward it and it gets higher and higher in the sky so you have to keep tilting your hear farther back. As you cross the equator, you are looking straight up. When you get far enough south of the equator that your next hurts, you turn around to face the moon and… it’s upside down.
But, everything is backwards. If woe stand facing south, the sun rises to our left and passes left to right in front of us and sets to our right. The waxing half moon, about a week after “new moon” is right in front of us as the sun sets. The line goes down the middle of it and the right side of it is illuminated by that setting sun. Each day after that w go out and look again at sunset. Each day, the moon is a bit further left – I describe is as sliding backward in the sky, moving away form the sun. The light/dark line has moved to the left so that more of the moon is illuminated.
Now go to the Southern Hemisphere and switch all of the lefts for rights and all of the rights for lefts. The moon falling behind the sun is drifting to the right, the light/dark divider is drifting right, the left side of the waxing moon is illuminated. It’s all backwards! and the damn thing is upside down.
You know, if there was a significant sunspot so that you could tell then you’d discover that the Aussie sun is upside down too! Oh fuck… all of their planets are upside down… And, poor Orion…
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