How to follow the cycle of the moon

If you live in a city, you’ll know it isn’t easy to follow the cycle of the moon. If you’re in a desert or in the middle of an ocean and there isn’t a streetlight for hundreds of miles, the stars are so big and so close and you can watch the sky turning and the stars rising and setting and you have to remind yourself that the sky isn’t moving, it’s the earth that’s turning. And you can watch the moon changing over the whole month. From new to full and back to new again.

But in a city, there’s air pollution and light pollution and there are buildings cluttering up the horizon. And you might if you’re lucky catch a glimpse of the moon, sometimes a crescent, sometimes a half-moon sometimes a gibbous moon, sometimes full. But you can’t grasp the whole picture. You’re unable to say, ‘Tonight the moon will be so many days old, it will rise at this time, and it will have this or that shape.”

And so this piece is written to give the whole story. The beginning, middle, end and beginning again of the moon’s orbit round the earth. Where to expect to see her. What shape you expect to find her in. But as to what it all means astrologically, that will have to wait. First let’s make sense of the mechanics of it and learn how to follow the cycle of the moon.

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