Moon Phases Incorrect? Options

[jase439]

As I was driving home from work tonight, I was watching the rising of the big bold yellow full harvest moon. After I came home, I fired up the sim to see what effects FS would give me. To my surprise, it gave me a lackluster gibbus moon. It seems the moon phases are all mucked up - is this controlled by a data file or are the moon phases just coded to appear randomly in the sim?

[Kurt]

They seem to be correct on my system, did you check the date ?

http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/36261.jpg


Kurt M

[SteveLewis]

Kurt,
That's the same Moon I flew with last night from Kansas City to St Louis. Beautiful! Got to watch Moon Rise on my way East.

[Enzoblue]

It's called the Harvest moon. The moon is in the night sky for the longest period of time, this gives farmers a chance to get some late night harvesting done

[Nathan Palmer]

Same here. My dates are correct and I have a quarter moon? I wonder why some users have it correct and other (like me) dont?

NP

[Ray Proudfoot]

It's called the Harvest moon. The moon is in the night sky for the longest period of time...

Not quite correct. The longest time the moon can be visible is when it is full on a date close to the shortest day - 21 Dec in the Northern Hemisphere and 22 June in the Southern Hemisphere. In my latitude (53.26N) this would be close to 16 hours - quite a bit longer than around the equinox's when day and night are of equal length and therefore the full moon could not be above the horizon longer than 12 hours.

Cheers,

[jase439]

Thank you! So I'm not going crazy after all. Now if only I could figure out why the moon phases are messed. I wonder if this is controlled by data somehow.

I do have a replacement for stars.dat installed. I wonder if that could be causing issues? Short of that I'd have to start looking at things like FSNav, FSUIPC, or WideFS since those are the only simulation level addons I have installed.

Maybe it has to do with how you start the sim? How many of you are going straight to your default situation vs starting from the Create Flight menu? Do you have use Use System Time on Startup selected?

[Enzoblue]

Thanks for the correction Ray, gonna read up more on that. Got my first ever telescope a couple of months ago and still learning alot.

[Tim13]

What kind of scope did you get?

Tim13

[jase439]

Interestingly, I found that if you set the date to September 9 - the moon is only a half moon. Move the date forward 2 days - September 11 - the moon is instantly a full moon. Go figure!

[michal]

>Maybe it has to do with how you start the sim? How many of
>you are going straight to your default situation vs starting
>from the Create Flight menu? Do you have use Use System Time
>on Startup selected?

Nope. I don't think anything of the above is important though if I were you I would keep trying anything ...

What is important is that "real" current time must correspond to the "system time" within the simulator as shown on your "creat flight" page. Then pick some airport in your time zone. The bottom line - FS9 seems smart enough to know that say on Sept. 11, 2003 the moon is almost full and located at about azimuth 75 as viewed say from Bakersfield, California (I live in CA). Not only the phase is correct but its exact placement in the sky seems to be correct too.

Michael J.
http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

[Ray Proudfoot]

Enzoblue,

Just to confirm I'm happy that the phases of the moon are being displayed correctly in FS2004. Here's two images - the first is the moon's phase as at 20.00GMT 11 September 2003 as shown on this web site http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/vphase.html.

http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/36503.jpg

The second image is a screenshot taken at EGCC in FS2004 at 20.15GMT on Sept 11 2003.

http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/36504.jpg

There was a full moon yesterday.

I used to own an 11.75" Newtonian reflector 30 years ago when I lived in Norwich, England. Fortunately the skies were quite dark and the views were excellent at times. Usually in mid-winter when it was cold! It's a great hobby - what telescope do you have?

Cheers,

[michal]

>
>Interestingly, I found that if you set the date to September 9
>- the moon is only a half moon. Move the date forward 2 days
>- September 11 - the moon is instantly a full moon. Go
>figure!

I agree. It ain't right.


Michael J.
http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

[E]

>http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/36261.jpg

That's not the moon! That's an impending earth-killer asteroid strike!!!!

Actually, I've had the random incorrectness. I have no idea why it's right one day and wrong the next, with no changes and using default system time and location.

[damnlimey]

I use 2002 on winXP home. The computer's calendar shows the correct date and time zome (GMT -8 for California), but the startup screen for date and time is always 1 day and a few hours slow. e.g. - right now it's 3:07pm (PDT)on Friday Sept 12 but if I were to start FS2002 (which I can't 'cause I'm at work) it would show approx noon on sept 11.

What's that about??

:-hmmm

[Nathan Palmer]

Actually I just loaded up the Harvest moon night and found I had a full moon. I posted because I remember just a few days before I had no where close to a full moon so I thought that there was no way I would have a full moon on the night of the full moon so I too fall in that "it aint right" category.

NP

[jase439]

...but dumb enough to draw the moon at half full on September 9th

[jase439]

I see what they're doing now though:

They've broken the lunar cycle into seven 4-day phases w/ a couple days allotted for the new moon at the end of each cycle:

These include:

waxing crescent
first quarter
waxing gibbous
full moon
waning gibbous
last quarter
waning crescent

Alas, the waxing gibbous moon and first quarter moon in FS use nearly identical artwork. In fact, waxing gibbous looks just like first quarter - only rotated 5 degrees or so. So it appears in FS that first quarter lasts a full 8 days and then suddenly pops to a full moon.

I didn't notice this in FS2002 because I was using Chris Willis' moon textures. Hopefully, he will address this in his FS2004 release also.

In the interim, I created a new waxing gibbous bmp which looks more like the moon is 2/3 full rather than 1/2. Just drop this in your FS2004\TEXTURE folder.

[Enzoblue]

I went kind of cheap on the telescope and kind of regretting it now, (was saving up for addons!), it's an Orion 6" reflector.

Been reading up on making a larger Dobson type, it's quite daunting but the engineers at work said they'd help me any way the could and let me use equipment at work. The mirror will still cost a bundle making it myself, I'll have to save save save. Shooting for at least a 24".

Will get there someday

[michal]

>I see what they're doing now though:
>
>They've broken the lunar cycle into seven 4-day phases w/ a
>couple days allotted for the new moon at the end of each
>

I suspected something to be the case. Good find.

Michael J.

[Tim13]

Whoa, 24 inches! You should get some good views with that. Right now I have a LX200 8 inch classic that I've been using for 2 years. There's nothing quite like being out under the stars after the neighborhood goes to sleep, and doing some observing.

Tim13

[Chris Willis]

Hi Jase,
"I didn't notice this in FS2002 because I was using Chris Willis' moon textures"


My fs2002; moon, generic night texture works in fs2004.


Regards
Chris
Thanks
Chris Willis

[link:fsw.simflight.com/FSWMenuFsSim.html]Clouds And Addons For MsFs

[jase439]

They do, except for the fact that MS has added "moon glow" textures in FS9 which are sized to work with their original artwork. The moon is also visibly much smaller in FS2004 with your 2002 textures installed for some reason.