“The moon,” we say, “waxes and wanes.” No, for anyone in the 21st century, waxing of popular culture is not applicable. The moon is already a hairless body. Think, instead, phases of the moon, that is, the way we see however much of the moon’s daytime—sometimes more, as in a full moon, sometimes less, as in a quarter moon, and, of course, sometimes none, as in a new moon.
If you bother with such things, you know that the moon runs around our planet in a slightly inclined and elliptical orbit, and, for those on Earth, the moon rises about 50 minutes later each day until it cycles back to where it was in time and relative place about 28 days later. So, given that the moon rises, say, at 9:00 a.m. on one day, the next rising will be at 9:50 on the following day, and 10:40, and so on, progressing through both our days and our nights. When the rise is at night, it sometimes catches our attention, “Wow! Look at that moon!”
Turns out that my simple method of finding the location of the moon with respect to your horizon, is, in fact, just an approximation. For navigators and astronomers, the matter is a bit more serious and more mathematical. People take this stuff seriously. There’s a book. Really. There’s one entitled The Complete Mathematical and General Navigation Tables, Including Every Table Selected with the Nautical Almanac in Finding Latitude and Longitude: with an Explanation of Their Construction, Use, and Application to Navigation and Nautical Astronomy, Trigonometry, Dialling, Gunnery, Etc. Etc, written by Thomas Kerigan of the Royal Navy in 1836. And it’s a two-volume work. Kerigan shows his calculations for the moon’s rising that takes into account refraction by Earth’s atmosphere and the offset by parallax. Snooze. “You’re boring me here, professor.”
“Bear with me a moment longer. You’ve already committed to reading the above. Might as well finish this thing to see where I’m going. One of the astronomers who gave us a simpler way to calculate the moon’s rising was Truman Henry Safford, who was born the same year that Kerigan published his book. Now, you might think that since yours truly just gave you a rule of thumb on calculating the time of the moon’s rise, that it seems silly for someone to be defined as ‘one who gave us a simpler way to calculate the moon’s rising.’ Why not just use the simple method of adding 50 minutes per day that I gave above?”
Truman Henry Safford was famous in his time for having the ability as a child to do some big calculating in his head. Once presented as a ten-year-old with a squaring problem of daunting difficulty, he solved it IN HIS HEAD within a minute. The problem was “What is the square of 365,365,365,365,365,365?” (I’ll give you a minute to figure the answer…………………………What? Did you think I was going to spoon-feed it to you? The kid did it in his head)
How does one wax to such brilliance by age 10? He didn’t know. No one knows now. And no one knows why such ability can wane with age, as it did in Truman’s brain. Yes, over time he seems to have lost the ability that he couldn’t explain even when he had it. As a child, he just calculated.
Now, you might not be a prodigy. But you certainly have had some ability as mysterious as Truman’s. You waxed into it unexpectedly. You waned from it gradually. There’s an intensity that fades from full moon to new moon in almost every aspect of our lives. The trick to shining like the risen full moon is curiosity. You might not be able to calculate when that new ability will suddenly rise; you might have some false rising caused by the parallax of your dreams over reality. But curiosity keeps the potential for the rise just 50 minutes later into the next day. What you were isn’t going to be there at the same time that it was the day before. Think not of past risings. Look toward the horizon. Repeated waning makes room for new waxing. Repeated setting makes way for new rising, maybe not in the same way or in the same place, but a rising nevertheless. There’s a potential prodigy in you. Look toward the horizon.
If you bother with such things, you know that the moon runs around our planet in a slightly inclined and elliptical orbit, and, for those on Earth, the moon rises about 50 minutes later each day until it cycles back to where it was in time and relative place about 28 days later. So, given that the moon rises, say, at 9:00 a.m. on one day, the next rising will be at 9:50 on the following day, and 10:40, and so on, progressing through both our days and our nights. When the rise is at night, it sometimes catches our attention, “Wow! Look at that moon!”
Turns out that my simple method of finding the location of the moon with respect to your horizon, is, in fact, just an approximation. For navigators and astronomers, the matter is a bit more serious and more mathematical. People take this stuff seriously. There’s a book. Really. There’s one entitled The Complete Mathematical and General Navigation Tables, Including Every Table Selected with the Nautical Almanac in Finding Latitude and Longitude: with an Explanation of Their Construction, Use, and Application to Navigation and Nautical Astronomy, Trigonometry, Dialling, Gunnery, Etc. Etc, written by Thomas Kerigan of the Royal Navy in 1836. And it’s a two-volume work. Kerigan shows his calculations for the moon’s rising that takes into account refraction by Earth’s atmosphere and the offset by parallax. Snooze. “You’re boring me here, professor.”
“Bear with me a moment longer. You’ve already committed to reading the above. Might as well finish this thing to see where I’m going. One of the astronomers who gave us a simpler way to calculate the moon’s rising was Truman Henry Safford, who was born the same year that Kerigan published his book. Now, you might think that since yours truly just gave you a rule of thumb on calculating the time of the moon’s rise, that it seems silly for someone to be defined as ‘one who gave us a simpler way to calculate the moon’s rising.’ Why not just use the simple method of adding 50 minutes per day that I gave above?”
Truman Henry Safford was famous in his time for having the ability as a child to do some big calculating in his head. Once presented as a ten-year-old with a squaring problem of daunting difficulty, he solved it IN HIS HEAD within a minute. The problem was “What is the square of 365,365,365,365,365,365?” (I’ll give you a minute to figure the answer…………………………What? Did you think I was going to spoon-feed it to you? The kid did it in his head)
How does one wax to such brilliance by age 10? He didn’t know. No one knows now. And no one knows why such ability can wane with age, as it did in Truman’s brain. Yes, over time he seems to have lost the ability that he couldn’t explain even when he had it. As a child, he just calculated.
Now, you might not be a prodigy. But you certainly have had some ability as mysterious as Truman’s. You waxed into it unexpectedly. You waned from it gradually. There’s an intensity that fades from full moon to new moon in almost every aspect of our lives. The trick to shining like the risen full moon is curiosity. You might not be able to calculate when that new ability will suddenly rise; you might have some false rising caused by the parallax of your dreams over reality. But curiosity keeps the potential for the rise just 50 minutes later into the next day. What you were isn’t going to be there at the same time that it was the day before. Think not of past risings. Look toward the horizon. Repeated waning makes room for new waxing. Repeated setting makes way for new rising, maybe not in the same way or in the same place, but a rising nevertheless. There’s a potential prodigy in you. Look toward the horizon.
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