The Almost Full Moon and Blogspot Post Times

Just before we left Anchorage I posted a picture of the full moon and the moonlight. And here we are on the other side of the world looking at the same moon. I know it's a much often used device, yet it is still amazing to me that as far away as I go, the sun and moon are always there and people far apart can look at the same moon at the same time. (That raises a question I have never thought about - are there two places in the world from where you can never see the moon and/or sun at the same time? Joel?)

[Update Jan 15 (Thai Time): My son has answered this question by email:

basically no. At the extreme, where they are on opposite ends, it gets a bit tricky since the horizon is almost horizonal. But it isn't quite, since your eyes are not on the ground, and on top of that the earth's atmosphere bends light about 3 degrees at the horizon. So you can see 186 degrees, effectively, and even the moon is far enough away that I doubt it's in the blind spot. The sun has a much bigger diameter than the earth, so it could never be in a blind spot.]

As you can see from my pictures, I haven't figured out how to set my Canon Powershot SD 790 so that the brightness of the moon, surrounded by the blackness of the sky, isn't overexposed. If anyone out there has a suggestion, please comment or email.

On the other hand, we are all used to the giant telephotoed pictures of the moon with every crater showing. These give a different view of the moon.

In this last one, I played around a little bit with it in iPhoto.

These pictures were taken at 5:57am Chiang Mai time. I went to bed about 9:30 last night and just recently woke up. The birds are making interesting noises, though roosters are the most common. The temple gong just marked 6:30. The sky is greying above the mountain Doi Suthep. We have a western facing view, so the other side of the sky is probably lighter. The computer says it is 53˚F (almost 12˚C) so it is a bit chilly in here.

[Update: Here's the moon and sky 42 minutes later at 6:45am from our balcony]

Computer time

I've reset my computer so it has local time. Last year I left my computer on Anchorage time. The blog post timing is set in blooger and it would make more sense on the blog to have my actual local time for my posts. Fiddling with basic things like that on blogger make me nervous. No telling what other strange things it will cause. Will all most posts get changed to Thai time? Probably not, but things got all screwed up early on when we changed to Daylight Savings Time. I had to change it to Pacific Standard time for the blog to work. OK, let me change it and see what happens.

Hah! I was right. (Am I starting to think in blogger?) It changed all the old posts to Thai time. So I changed it back to Alaska time. So just add 16 hours to the post times.

Update 7:23am - It's easier to get the moon when the background sky isn't so dark.]