The moon is wanning now. In its fullness it was called the dark moon as the night has taken over all our lives at the moment. It, itself, was far from dark and in its last moments of fullness it displayed a spectacular optical phenomenon in the form of a moon halo.
My compact camera really does not do it justice. RJCobain does a much better job with the same moon on the same night. Orion can be seen in the bottom right corner of the picture. It was said long ago that the moon halo was a sign of rain and that if you count the stars inside the halo that will tell you the days of rain to come. It was also said that if you rub half a potato on a wort and then bury the potato, the wort will go away. On a similar note, although not an old story, a friend of mine once had a headache. He sat for the evening with a cat on his head and his headache went away. Clearly cats on heads cure headaches.
November 27, 2010 at 12:42 am
Nice one, I’m glad you noticed this as I had put it in my Facebook status that night for people to look out at the moon and nobody did.It was better than the meteorite shower a few months ago as you could actually see something.
After doing a bit of Googling I think that it was called a 22° halo, but I could be wrong.
November 29, 2010 at 10:20 pm
I also facebooked (it is the way of things these days) and I also googled it (the cry of this generation). I have seen it a few times before but that does not diminish from the delight of seeing it. I was hypnotised by it for a while that night. I would love to see moon dogs some day or maybe even a moon pillar. I guess we all need to keep getting out there and look around us as much as we can at the beauty of it all.