: Well...Ace does it again.
Ace has done a good job in photographing, but not so good in presenting.
If you notice the time stamps the photo taken second is placed to the left of the photo taken first. So if reading left to right the photo of 0417 is seen before the one of 0053, implying an anti-clockwise rotation. I would be interested as to why this was done. Acetro, can you tell me why you did this? I would have placed the 0053 to the left of the 0417 so they could be read left to right in chronological order.
But if you read these photos right-to-left ie in their true chronological order, this indicates an apparent clockwise rotation. This apparent clockwise rotation is well documented and understood. Basic astronomy books and a search on "apparent moon rotation" will bring a wealth of info on this.
So what causes this APPARENT rotation? The moon APPEARS to rotate clockwise due to its orbit of the Earth. It shows us the same face, hence the dark side of the moon, and has an orbit that is inclined at 5 degrees to the ecliptic. To show how this apparent rotation works place your hand in front of your face, palm facing you. You may wish to draw a vertical line on it. Now try to imagine your hand is the moon orbiting the Earth at a 5 degree angle. If you move your hand so that it stays the same distance away from your face and in an orbit 5 degrees to the horizontal keeping the palm facing you at all times you will see that the vertical line on your palm has rotated. It has not rotated about an axis through the palm, but due to its orbit it has appeared to rotate.
This is very difficult to explain without diagrams and not face-to-face, but this apparent clockwise rotation of the moon has been known about for years, and is why the astronomical community is not screaming their heads off trying to get our attention. It is why astronomical photographers at "Lunar Photo of the Day" or ObservingTheSky are not blogging this. It's why the Islamic community aren't screaming about it.
Last year when this was being raised someone over at STA found a program called "mooncalc" that showed apparent clockwise rotation of the moon. I've downloaded it this morning and am having trouble unzipping it. But I'll bet that if you type in Aces coordinates in the Netherlands and the times at which the photos were taken the images calculated by mooncalc and the photos will match. I used mooncalc last year (on a different computer) and it was correct.
Mooncalc available at
http://www.ummah.org.uk/ildl/mooncalc.html
(ignore the curry logins)
