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Community photo entitled  by Marcella Giulia Pace on 02/24/2020 at Ragusa, Sicily-ITA

On 02/24/2020 by Marcella Giulia Pace| Ragusa, Sicily-ITA

"Teacher, you can find the Moon in the sky only at night and it is not visible in all its phases during the day."
This kind of observation has been so frequent during many years of teaching in primary school.
And many books, actually, represent the Moon as a sky element that belongs exclusively to the night.

But, as we all know, Instead the Moon, every day and for a certain period of time, keeps company with the Sun during its daily stay in the sky.

So, to demonstrate and document this fact, I shot the Moon during all its phases, setting the rule that I should have captured it only when the Sun would have been above the horizon in the sky.

This is the reason why all these Moons' images have a different shades of the daytime sky background.

The phases in which the Moon is present in the sky but no visibile to the human eye, are the phases that anticipate or precede the New Moon.
This is because the crescent moon is very thin and you need to know the exact position of the moon to be able to see it.
In this sequence, I managed to shoot a thin crescent moon with 1.2% lighting, 5 minuter after sunset.

During the New Moon phase the Moon accompanies the Sun on its daytime journey. So, it's there, in the sky, but not visible, except during a solar eclipse. And so, I inserted a shot, always taken from Italy, of the partial eclipse of the Sun that occurred in March 2015. The photo was taken with the only help of the clouds, one of the most "natural" optical filters. The lunar disk is clearly visible overlapping the solar one.

The Full Moon rises at sunset and falls at dawn the next day, since it's in opposition to the Sun. It would be the phase in which the two stars never meet in the sky. But not all Full Moons arise shortly after the Sun has set and vice versa: I was waiting for the Full Moon March 2020, as it rose a few minutes before the Sun went down. Even at dawn, on the following day, I attempted to shoot it but, because of the cloudy weather, I inserted in my sequence, a Moon set after the sun had risen, captured in 2018.

Author: Marcella Giulia Pace
Location: Ragusa, Italy

Nikon D7100, tripod

To make this work even more rigorous, I set myself the rule of shooting as many phases as possible, with the same camera settings, to get a more reliable comparison of the colors of the sky and the shades of blue-blue:
Canon sx 60hs, f8, 1/200 sec, ISO 100, 247mm
with the exceptions of:
- 13/05/2021: 1/160 sec
- 27/01/2020: 1/160 sec
- 09/03/2020: 1/15 sec
- 11/02/2020: 1/125 sec
- 09/05/2021: 1/125 sec
- the Moon during the solar eclipse.