During this lunar phase, we see part of the moon illuminated because only a part of the moon that is being illuminated by the sun is visible to us, he said. Quarter moons occur when the moon is neither on the opposite side of the Earth relative to the sun nor on the same side, he added. Meanwhile, seeing a quarter moon (where the face of the moon appears half-illuminated) during the day is “very natural,” Boylan-Kolchin said, and tells us what portion of the lunar month we are in. Only at full moon is the moon actually up all night, and down all day,” he said. At full moon, the moon rises as the sun sets and at the end of that night the moon sets at sunrise. “People only notice the moon more often at night because then it is the brightest thing in the sky. This means that some of the time, the moon is between the Earth and the sun, some of the time the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun, and sometimes it is roughly at the same distance as the Earth from the sun, he explained ( here).ĭay and night have nothing to do with it, Silas Laycock, associate professor of physics at the Center for Space Science and Technology, University of Massachusetts, told Reuters. “The moon completes an orbit around the Earth roughly once every month (the orbital period is 29.5 days),” Boylan-Kolchin said.
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