Australian Man Realizes Moon Looks Different In Northern Hemisphere After Living There Several Years

Popular TikTok user coreyyy.exe put an appeal out to his followers for any facts which they think should be common knowledge, but for one reason or another are not.

“I’ll go first,” he said in the TikTok video. “Why the fuck 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 and vice versa?”

“This is what I’m talking about, bro, I moved to a different hemisphere and I still didn’t realize it until years in. And I knew something was up but I couldn’t fuckin put my finger on it,” he added, before explaining why this is the case.

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Corey, judging by the comments, is not the only person to be confused about the Moon looking different from different hemispheres. In fact, it’s a fairly common question over on Reddit, and anyway, there is no shame in not knowing something. 

There isn’t much science to explain here. Essentially, the Moon looks different from different hemispheres in the same way your house will look different if you turn your head upside-down. 

The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, meaning that its rotation speed around its own axis matches the time it takes to orbit around the Earth. This is true of most planet-moon systems where the planet is much larger than the moon in question and close enough to it, as the smaller body’s rotation speed is altered as it orbits the planet with much more mass until they are in sync. This is why we always see the same side of the Moon, and never the far side (not the “dark side”, as it actually receives about the same amount of sunlight as the nearest side to Earth).

However, the Moon is on a slightly tilted angle, making it appear to take a curved path across our sky as the Earth rotates. It’s this slight tilt, of about 5 degrees, which means that we don’t get an eclipse every month, as the Moon passes north or south of the Sun from our perspective.

That is all extraneous information, though, with the main point being that the Moon appears differently in different hemispheres because you yourself are seeing it from a different angle.

Along the equator, you get a view of the Moon looking like it is tilted on its side. Although to you, that will look like the normal way, with the people above and below you getting the weird view.

“No-one talks about it,” Corey added. “I wanna see some flat earthers have a crack at this one as well.”