You don’t really have to get up this early in the morning hours of Saturday to see the Last Quarter Moon.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
I show the situation soon after Moonrise in order to make a compact picture! As the night goes on, the Moon will slant upward, parallel to the celestial equator, and greet you at its highest in the early hours of daylight,
At Last Quarter phase, the Moon always rises about midnight. It is crossing over our orbit in front of us – you can see that it’s close to the point marked “Earth’s direction of travel.”
In June, because the Sun is on the northernmost ecliptic in Taurus, the Last Quarter Moon, 90° to the “right” (west) of the Sun, is back near where the ecliptic and celestial equator cross in Aquarius. So the Moon is at a mid level between north and south and will not climb very high. And this June, it happens to be traveling well south of the ecliptic. You can see that, a few hours ago, it passed about 3° south of Mars, which is passing south of (invisible) Neptune, which is a degree or so south of the ecliptic plane.
Next day, June 14, is the day when the Sun rises earliest, for places on Earth at latitude 40° north. We have to discuss every year why earliest sunrise comes before, and latest sunset after, the June solstice. I’ll quote from my Astronomical Calendar 2016L
“Why do earliest sunrise and latest sunset not coincide with the longest day, nor latest sunrise and earliest sunset with the shortest? They do, if we measure hours from true solar midnight and noon. But our clocks use mean solar time, as if noons were a fixed distance apart; which they are not, because of the difference of actual from mean solar time.”
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Nearer-to-home Department
At the end of my morning bike ride, I find a crowd of birds on the quay in front of Isleworth church glebe (that’s what a church’s piece of land is called).
Thirty or so pigeons around my feet (unfortunately they fluttered into the air a moment too soon) and a parliament of geese along the railing. Or, if the tide is lower,
– a larger and more mixed congeries down on the foreshore.
Later today we took a walk along the Thames path. At one place a fallen tree lies in the water, tethered with a rope, its roots still nearly where they were and its leaves still alive. Farther along, another tree lies tether, but must have floated from somewhere else.
It has evidently become a feeding-ground for birds. We noticed a remarkable one, but he dived under. We waited to see him come up. What lungs! He may have surfaced a hundred yards or more away. This was him:
Great Crested Grebe.
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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after positing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Did the grebe come up on the glebe? I’ve never seen or heard the word glebe before, and if asked to define “grebe” I would have said a kind of waterfowl. So, off to the dictionary.
From the Merriam Webster Dictionary online:
grebe noun \ ˈgrēb \
any of a family (Podicipedidae) of swimming and diving birds closely related to the loons but having lobed toes
— compare DABCHICK
First Known Use of grebe: 1766, in the meaning defined above
History and Etymology for grebe: French grèbe
glebe noun \ ˈglēb \
1 (archaic): LAND, specifically : a plot of cultivated land
2: land belonging or yielding revenue to a parish church or ecclesiastical benefice
First Known Use of glebe: 14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1
History and Etymology for glebe: Latin gleba clod, land
The dawn dance has been quite a spectacle. But even here at 38 degrees north latitude, I have to get up well before 4 am to see the stars before astronomical dawn. Next Friday morning June 19, the Moon will be closely conjunct Venus. I’m looking forward to that, and hoping for clear weather. People in New England and the Canadian Maritimes will see an occultation!
Merriam Webster has given you sound information about the words, but there is much deeper information in the OED, Oxford English Dictionary: pronunciations by region, degree of frequency in current use, variant spellings, etymology, forms in related languages, meanings in historical order, citations for earliest and many later uses, sometimes extensive essays about the development of the word and scholarly debates over it. I suspect that other dictionaries now rely on the OED. Its online form is so expensive that institutions, rather than individuals, subscribe to it. But in the UK, if you have a membership card for a public library, you can access the OED through the library system. Maybe that is so in the US. You could ask your library about it and how to set it up. All I have to do, after going to the OED site, is type “D” (for Dorset, whose library system hasn’t deleted my membership after I moved away) and click on what automatically appears.
Thanks Guy. I’m an active user of the San Francisco Public Library. I checked the library website, and the online OED is listed as an electronic resource, but when I clicked on the link I wasn’t able to access the dictionary. I’ll consult a librarian when they open for (virtual) business later today.
I need to be careful around rabbit holes like the OED … .
I’ve fallen more deeply in love with Merriam Webster since reading MW lexicographer Kory Stamper’s 2017 book “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries”. Equal parts history, personal memoir, and opinions on current controversies, I was fascinated by the inside look at the passionate people who create a dictionary and how they do it. It’s a sisyphean undertaking.
I saw some strange birds a few days ago but not as exotic as yours.i saw black and white ducks swimming in the sea.as we know ducks are mainly freshwater and I don’t know if they can drink sea water?I looked these up and they are Eider ducks.some, presumably the females?,looked just like normal ducks.got me thinking about ducks,geese and swans in sea water and I can hardly think of any I’ve seen in the sea? perhaps these Eider ducks go to freshwater to drink unless they can filter out the salt?
Love these photos – thank you!