Here you see yesterday’s early morning moon on the rise over Great Cove. When the conditions are right, we can see the moon during the day for the same reason that we can see it on many nights: it’s nearby and reflecting sunlight, which makes it brighter than the surrounding sky, hence visible to us. Although the moon does not create any light of its own, the reflected sunlight makes it our second-brightest celestial object after the sun.
When this image was taken Sunday, the moon was in a waning gibbous phase and about 236 thousand miles away from the camera lens. As you probably know, the moon is “waning” when its lighted area is in the monthly process of getting smaller; it is “gibbous” when it is more than half lighted, but not full. Gibbous is from the Latin for hunch-backed. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on February 12, 2023.)