Bad moon rising
Bedtime books for kids show it backward
OTTAWA — Here’s a quirk to look for when you read your youngster a storybook about a good little boy or girl heading off to bed: Is the moon in the illustration backward?
Bedtime is a popular theme in children’s books, but illustrators have a habit of showing a crescent moon flipped around in a way that a sleepy child would never see it.
The issue is a physics-meetsart story about force, mass and illustration. And it has even hooked a (mostly) serious astrophysicist.
Here’s the problem: The moon goes through phases, from a slim crescent “new” moon through the full moon and on to a crescent “old” moon. That’s because as the moon orbits the Earth, we are sometimes facing the moon’s sunny side (a full moon) but more often facing parts of the dark side.
The old moon curves the same direction as the letter C. The new moon curves the other way.
Here’s the strange part: When people draw a crescent moon, they almost always draw the C-shape that is only visible a little before sunrise — not an ideal bedtime for children. The other crescent, the backward C, is the one visible in the early evening sky.
A small-scale survey in an Ottawa Public Library branch found storybook after storybook in which children are drifting off to sleep at 4 to 5 a.m. Don’t they have school tomorrow?
(A side note: The curving crescents are reversed when viewed from the southern hemisphere, so all these storybooks make perfect sense in Australia.)
Some illustrations, like those in the famous bedtime book Goodnight Moon, show a full moon and avoid the whole issue. And some get it right, including Steven Spielberg in the logo of his company, DreamWorks.
It’s not just children’s stories that show the moon this way. Many flags show a just-before-sunrise moon, including those from Algeria, Libya, Pakistan, Turkey, Tunisia, Singapore. Turkmenistan, on the other hand, shows a sense of individuality by displaying the opposite crescent moon.
Scientists have actually taken action in the past when physics banged heads with art, as astronomer Paul Delaney of York University notes. He says it was once common to find pictures of a star twinkling through the inside of the crescent moon — which isn’t possible because there’s still solid moon in the way.
“That has been since corrected because a lot of amateur and professional astronomers started pointing it out to publishers,” he says. “I actually still put it as a test question (at York): ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ And you would be surprised how many people don’t clue in to it.”
A Dutch expert in quasars felt so strongly about unscientific Christmas cards and wrapping paper he did a 2011 survey, published as Santa and the Moon. “The UNICEF card, of British design, showed children decorating an outdoor Christmas tree,” says Peter Barthel of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute at the University of Groningen. “Judging from the moon phase, the scene takes place at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. ... which is not impossible but unlikely.”