I wasn't expecting this, because it is, of course, going from East to West in both hemispheres. But after a lifetime of seeing it swing anti-clockwise round the northern half of the sky, it was very disorienting moving to Germany and seeing the sun swinging clockwise in the southern sky.
... and I did not notice this in the slightest when I switched hemispheres. To be fair, I don't exactly spend a lot of time outdoors; the motion of the sun is obscure to me at the best of times.
I knew the Sun went the other way because Dorothy Sayers mentioned it in the notes to her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, but I had not extended this knowledge to realize that the Moon would of course be reversed not only in path but also in phase. So the mnemonic of the young moon being shaped like "b" for baby and the old moon being shaped like "d" for dying doesn't work there! FASCINATING.
I am definitely not aphantasic. Interestingly, one of my sisters is, and is also a much better artist than me, insofar as she can copy a reference image photorealistically. She cannot art at all without reference images. She'll have to find the right ones and then photoshop them together to make a picture, and she doesn't have an innate sense of layout or composition to guide her. I've thus had the interesting experience of acting as a sort of prosthetic visual imagination for an aphantasic artist, even though I myself have the drawing skills of an average kindergartner.
(Example: The library was holding a bookmark design contest for its summer reading program. The theme was something like "Worlds Connect At Your Library". One drew / colored on an entry form which basically had a box for the design on one side and then the spaces for one's personal info on the other. My design was super simple, a bright yellow flying saucer at the top with a dramatic curved yellow swoosh across the dark sky, leading down to a bright Earth with rather smudged and blobby continents. My sister's design was a very large red book with a gold gothic-font title, standing up open with a wizard's hat and hand showing from behind it, the hand holding a wand from which a spray of stars went up to an Earth above the wizard's head. Her Earth was much better than mine, her details far more detailed... but she could not decide what line the spray of stars should follow. Straight, S-shaped, she tried various ones in Photoshop, but none looked good. So she asked me for help, and I drew her a pair of simple fair-line curves with two sweeps of my hand. If the spray of stars looked suspiciously like my UFO trail in silhouette, well, we were in different age divisions and we both won, and anyway hers was made up of individual stars once she finished drawing it, instead of just being a swoosh.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2020-11-13 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 09:07 pm (UTC)The moon on the Southern hemisphere is upside down *nods to self*
no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 09:43 pm (UTC)I wasn't expecting this, because it is, of course, going from East to West in both hemispheres. But after a lifetime of seeing it swing anti-clockwise round the northern half of the sky, it was very disorienting moving to Germany and seeing the sun swinging clockwise in the southern sky.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-17 10:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-14 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-14 12:21 am (UTC)I am definitely not aphantasic. Interestingly, one of my sisters is, and is also a much better artist than me, insofar as she can copy a reference image photorealistically. She cannot art at all without reference images. She'll have to find the right ones and then photoshop them together to make a picture, and she doesn't have an innate sense of layout or composition to guide her. I've thus had the interesting experience of acting as a sort of prosthetic visual imagination for an aphantasic artist, even though I myself have the drawing skills of an average kindergartner.
(Example: The library was holding a bookmark design contest for its summer reading program. The theme was something like "Worlds Connect At Your Library". One drew / colored on an entry form which basically had a box for the design on one side and then the spaces for one's personal info on the other. My design was super simple, a bright yellow flying saucer at the top with a dramatic curved yellow swoosh across the dark sky, leading down to a bright Earth with rather smudged and blobby continents. My sister's design was a very large red book with a gold gothic-font title, standing up open with a wizard's hat and hand showing from behind it, the hand holding a wand from which a spray of stars went up to an Earth above the wizard's head. Her Earth was much better than mine, her details far more detailed... but she could not decide what line the spray of stars should follow. Straight, S-shaped, she tried various ones in Photoshop, but none looked good. So she asked me for help, and I drew her a pair of simple fair-line curves with two sweeps of my hand. If the spray of stars looked suspiciously like my UFO trail in silhouette, well, we were in different age divisions and we both won, and anyway hers was made up of individual stars once she finished drawing it, instead of just being a swoosh.)