In the news are reports that the December 2008 full moon was the biggest and brightest of the year. True enough. The moon’s orbit isn’t perfectly circular, so the moon is sometimes a bit closer to the earth and sometimes a bit further away. December’s full the moon was as close to the earth as it gets. The result: a big, bright full moon.
Coincidentally, I caught a glimpse of the moon — one of the most unusual nearly-full moon’s I’ve ever seen — Thursday morning, Dec. 11, while walking the dog along the lakeshore. I wish I had camera with me; I’m at a loss to describe it with words.
Strolling along Harbor Drive in the wind and cold before sunrise, I happened to see a long, thin red glow out in the lake. At first I thought it was a ship, but the color wasn’t right. As the minutes ticked by, I realized I was looking at the moon slipping out from behind the clouds through what must have been a narrow swath of clear sky at the horizon toward the northwest. As I made my way north, the big, red moon, misshapen by refraction in the thick atmosphere, set gently on top of the lighthouse.
And after seeing the sight, I was reminded of an experiment I conducted, or rather tried to conduct, as you’ll learn, some years ago when I was unencumbered by having a regular job.
The holiday season is a busy time of year. Have you ever wished there were more hours in a day to get things done? Sometimes just an extra hour would be so helpful.
The sun defines our sometimes-too-short twenty-four hour day. The sun rises, passes overhead, sets and rises again once every twenty-four hours, and we march to the beat of its drum.
The moon, however, drums a different beat. The moon rises and sets about fifty minutes later each day compared to the day before. This delay, a consequence of the fact that the moon makes its way around the earth once each month. A day by the moon is nearly twenty-five hours long — there’s that extra hour!
So one day in Y2K, I decided I would try to live on moon time. I would get up around moonrise and go to bed around moonset, following the moon around the month, living luxurious twenty-five-hour-long days.
I started to march with the moon one day when the moon was new. The new moon rises and sets with the sun. Then each day I stayed up an extra hour or so and tried to sleep in an extra hour.
I was encouraged that I could adapt to the moon’s slow swing-shift by something I read about our natural sleep-wake cycle. It seems that physiological cycles combine with environmental signals, like the onset of darkness, to send us to bed at the end of each day. Absent the environmental clues — like when a sleep-research subject is asked to live in a cave for several months — it turns out our natural sleep-wake cycle runs more like twenty-five hours long. A moon day!
But I learned that the environmental clues are very powerful. After about ten days, when I was supposed to stay up to 7 am and sleep in until 3 pm, I was a zombie. I switched back to sun time and gave up the quest to put an extra hour in my day.
I’m interested to hear if anyone else has ever tried this.
This column originally appeared in the Grand Haven Tribune on 12 December 2008.
