Star In A Star
I’ve been introducing general audiences to the Moon phases for many years. But even today, when I wear the Moon Hat, it teaches me new things. That’s how I know I have created a true “tool” rather than just a fun design.
The Moon Hat keeps teaching me
A few cycles into wearing the Moon Hat every day, I realized I was paying a lot more attention to the waxing phases of the Moon.
That makes sense once you notice when the Moon is up. The waxing crescent hangs in the western sky after sunset. The first quarter Moon sits high in the south at sunset. And the Full Moon rises at sunset, flooding the early evening sky with light.
After the Full Moon, the Moon starts to wane. It’s harder to catch, because for most of the time it’s above the horizon, we are asleep. The hat kept nudging me to go looking for those waning phases in the morning sky.
The Moon phases look reversed
The first time an experienced astronomy teacher sees the Moon Hat, they often say: “The Moon phase images are not right!”
The images are “reversed” on purpose. Well, not actually reversed, but placed that way to immerse you in the experience.
The way to understand this design choice is to realize that the Moon Hat creates a model, and the person wearing the hat is inside the model. Imagine the phase images as little ping pong balls attached to the hat, lit by a Sun in front of you.
When you build the 3D version in your mind, it becomes easier to understand why they are arranged that way. Look in a mirror and you see each phase image correctly oriented. What you see in the mirror is the Moon shape you see in the sky.
The Moon Hat in the southern hemisphere
The Moon Hat works in the southern hemisphere too!
First of all, it’s a hat, and it will keep your head warm.
Also, it’s a symmetrical 3D model, so the general Moon phase pattern is the same. Except for one thing: the instruction tag inside is written for the northern hemisphere. In the south, the LEFT and RIGHT words stay the same, but the phase names are reversed, the waxing and waning sections switch places, and the arrows should point from left to right.
This is a great lesson in absolute versus local coordinate systems! It’s also a great mental exercise to imagine traveling south and seeing the sky from the southern hemisphere. Even with a planetarium tool like Stellarium, it’s tricky to “flip the sky” in your mind’s eye.
Writing for a global audience can be tricky. Most of the world’s population lives in the northern hemisphere, and because I write for a general audience I try to stay anchored there. Yes, northern bias :-) but only in the service of clarity. In the Moon phase names article, I note that the DOC “shape-ronym” becomes COD in the southern hemisphere. But sometimes I forget to address our southern visitors fully. I’m looking at you, Africa, Australia, and South America!
I lived in Australia for a few years, and I’ve written about what observational astronomy is like there: the Moon is upside down, the constellations are flipped, and things rise on your right when you face the Sun instead of your left.
What’s next: eclipses and the Moon’s nodes
My current exploration with the Moon Hat is using a marker to learn and teach the Moon’s ascending and descending nodes. Those are the two points where the Moon’s tilted orbit crosses the plane of Earth’s orbit, and eclipses only happen when a New or Full Moon lands near one of them. The hat already puts you inside a model of the Moon’s orbit, so it seems like a natural place to show why we don’t get an eclipse every month.
Get a Moon Hat
Get a Moon Hat for yourself, a friend, or a favorite niece or nephew.
I think it will change the way even practiced astronomers experience the Moon day to day. Moon phases are really just the first step in a series of questions you can ask about the Moon.
New to the Moon phases? Start with the Moon Dance, then see 10 ways to wear a Moon Hat and photos from Moon Hat customers.