Class: Celestial Studies (Professor Glimmerwick)
Pairs with: the moon-phase and moon-name lessons.
Trip type: Night Sky, At Home & Out.
Where it works: Anywhere you can see the sky on most evenings for one month: a yard, a balcony, a regular evening walk. This is the longest trip on the blog and the only one that comes to you. Free, a few minutes an evening, and the whole run of it takes a full turn of the moon.
Why we're going: The moon lessons lay out the phases and the old names given to each month's full moon, and diagrams make both look tidy. They are not tidy at the speed of looking. This trip slows the lesson down to moon speed: one honest drawing a night, in one notebook, until the cycle stops being a chart to memorize and becomes something you watched happen.
The mission: Keep company with the moon for a full month. Every clear evening, look at the moon and draw what you actually see, not the diagram in a book, the shape in front of you. By the month's end you will have watched it grow, vanish, and return. You will come home holding a dated journal of the whole cycle, clouded evenings honestly marked, including the night you first caught the new crescent.
What to record:
One sketch of the moon per clear evening, dated, kept in one notebook so the change reads like a story.
The time you looked, and where the moon sat in the sky (direction and height).
The evenings you missed to cloud, marked honestly in the journal rather than left blank.
The date you first caught the new crescent, and how thin it was.
Any traditional name your calendar or reading gives that month's full moon, and where the name comes from.
How it runs:
Level One — At Home: Keep the whole journal from home, from one chosen window or spot in the yard. Same place, same time, all month; consistency is what turns glances into a record.
Level Two — In Person: Keep the journal, but once in the month take it deliberately somewhere darker and wider, a field, a hill, a shoreline, on the evening of the full moon or the new crescent, and give that night a full page: the moon, the landscape under it, and how the light changed what you could see.
Picture ideas for the gallery:
Your journal open at a week's worth of sketches, the shape visibly changing across the page.
The full moon page from your one night out somewhere darker and wider, journal and landscape together.
Your chosen window or yard spot at dusk, the place the month was watched from.
The thinnest crescent you caught, sketched that same evening and photographed while it is fresh.
Etiquette & safety: Evening trips follow the office rule: go with someone, or tell someone where you are. If your darker spot needs a walk, take a torch for the path home and keep to ground you know.
Field Report: Which evening changed how you think about the moon, and what happened? File your report in the comments: where you went, what you found, and one thing that surprised you. Photographs go to the Field Trip Gallery through the form on the Field Trip Office page, with the town and country where they were taken.
