People are just realising why the moon looks different in different parts of the world.
While we might think the moon looks the same everywhere, this could not be more different from the truth. Depending where you are, you might see a very different version of our planet’s only satellite.
If you’ve ever travelled to the southern hemisphere, you might not have noticed that the moon appears flipped. Turns out, there’s a simple explanation for this, and it’s been explained in a recent video.
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In the clip, shared on TikTok by a man named Corey, he explained that the moon looks completely different depending on which hemisphere you’re in. For those of us in the UK, we’re used to seeing the moon the same way as everyone else in the northern hemisphere, but if you were to take a trip to somewhere like Australia, you’d be viewing the moon “upside down”.
The moon is a sphere, so the circular shape we see in the sky is the same regardless of which hemisphere you are in, but the craters you can see from Earth are flipped. While a typical view of a full moon from the northern hemisphere shows large dark patches on the left-hand side and fewer patches toward the right, the southern hemisphere sees things the other way around.
Corey, from Australia, said: “Why are we not shown in school that the way we see the moon in the southern hemisphere is upside down to the way it’s seen in the northern hemisphere? I moved to a different hemisphere and I still didn’t realise it for years, and I knew something was up but I couldn’t put my finger on it. This is what was up!
“This is because when you’re in the southern hemisphere, you have to look north to see the moon, and if you’re in the northern hemisphere, you have to look south. So the way you see the moon in Brazil is different to how you see it in England, and the way you see the moon in New Zealand is different to how you see it in Japan.”
Corey’s findings were backed by an article by Dr Alastair Gunn in BBC’s Science Focus magazine, who confirmed that the moon does appear “upside down” in the southern hemisphere because of the “orientation” of our planet.
He said: “These two observers are looking at the same object from opposite directions, and naturally, that means one sees the object flipped compared to the other. This means that the ‘Man in the Moon’ is upside down in the southern hemisphere and can actually look more like a rabbit.”
Commenters on Corey’s video shared their own experiences of being “blown away” by seeing the moon from a different angle when they went travelling. Others said the same is true for other things in our sky like constellations, which can appear the other way around for people in the southern hemisphere – and sometimes they can see different ones entirely.