Fun fact for the day:

[brin_bellway]

In the Northern Hemisphere the moon waxes/wanes right-to-left, while in the Southern Hemisphere it goes left-to-right.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

(I am not to the point of being aphantasic, but my visualisation ability is not as good as mindstalk and I struggle to run mental orreries in enough detail/cohesion to find results like these intuitive.)

[yvannairie]

The moon on the Southern hemisphere is upside down *nods to self*

[deird1]

Also, the sun moves the other way across the sky.

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.

[wolffyluna]

Huh, neat! It makes perfect sense, but it's not something I would have predicted by myself.

[thedarlingone]

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.