Lunastice
Taken by Juan Jose Ortiz on March 7, 2025 @
Metepec, Mexico
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Details:
Imagine taking a wide-field picture of the Moon every night as it crosses the meridian. Complicated task, because your sleep rhythm will be altered. Why? Because some nights that photo will have to be taken at inconvenient hours of the night. Don't worry, I did this job for you between March 6 and 23. Fortunately, the clouds were absent for 16 days. And what do you see with that effort? By placing the 17 photos in a row, we can see the pattern of the Moon's movement from a north declination to a south declination. But, in addition, these 17 nights were not nights like any other. The Moon had its maximum north declination on March 7 (major positive lunar standstill) and its maximum south declination on March 23 (major negative lunar standstill). Predictions of Fred Espenak (https://astropixels.com/ephemeris/moon/moondec2001.html). Therefore, the curve that we can see in the photographic sequence represents the maximum north-south oscillation that the Moon has every 18.6 years. The dawn of March 22 was cloudy, I marked with a cross the expected position of the Moon. If we repeat this same sequence in 2034 (March 13 to 26), we will obtain the minimum north-south oscillation that the Moon can have every 18.6 years (minor lunar standstill). The term lunar standstill or lunastice is like the term solstice, which is used to say that the Sun reaches its maximum northern declination (beginning of the boreal summer/beginning of the austral winter) or its maximum southern declination (beginning of the boreal winter/beginning of the austral summer). The photographic sequence also shows an interesting peculiarity: the eclipsed Moon in the photo of March 14. I took this photographic sequence from Metepec in Mexico (55 km west of Mexico City) using a Nikon D750 camera.
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