Sighting The Moon Crescent
Sighting the moon crescent
How is the first day of a month in the Lunar calendar determined?
You may think about so accurate softwares of these days and their predictions of the moon position of every time in every where! It is true,but there is another condition that the new month in Lunar Calendar starts, and this condition is just sighting the crescent of the young moon!
This action is most common on Islamic countries or lands which Lunar calendar is used.In Iran also there are some sites and people who work on it especially at the beginning of more important months like Ramadan and etc.
Observation of this fade,thin crescent is so hard and some times needs expert equipments and very fast time reaction(because moon is so close to fall under horizon!)There are some records for this action too!
Here is a photo of such a crescent(reference is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marubozo/5688570463/)
there is a question for myself:
If only seeing this crescent is the condition,how can we make sure that our equipments are strong enough to visit this valuable arc and there is a bug!because we can make these instruments as powerful as we want and maybe one day we can observe a crescent with our 30 inches telescope(!) that the other before days we just couldn't!so are the previous beginning of months wrong?!!
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