Crescent moon Unsolved Mystery

[Yankee Candle]

I have a bit of an unsolved mystery but I don't think I can either (1) prove it nor (2) expect someone to solve it.

On the night of August 7, 2005 I went to town to purchase an item at a book store. On the way back from town I was driving north on a road that led out of the city and just before I turned east on the Hwy near our home I looked up at the twilight sky in the west and saw an incredibly defined crescent moon and a star near its mouth. It was probably Venus but I don't recall now. Anyway, I thought it was so stunning that as soon as I got home about 20 minutes later I told my wife to run outside and take a look at the stunning crescent moon. I had just seen it again moments earlier as I pulled into our driveway so I excitedly told her to go out and take a look.

Then the surprises began...

She went to look and it was gone, moon, star and all. I couldn't believe it. I told her to drive up and down the local main drag of our community and get up on a hill to see it. She did but it was nowhere to be seen. I scratched my head over that one. Weird. I didn't know how the moon could have gone down so fast from about 20 degrees off the horizon which is about where I saw it before I entered my house.



But that wasn't all. What I had not noticed was that the lighted side of the crescent moon was on the opposite side to the setting sun! The crescent of the moon should have (according to the laws of physics) been facing the north with the mouth facing south. The logic being that the suns rays would strike the near side and not the far side of the moon. It did not occur to me until the next night, Monday, August 8th that the crescent had been backwards. At about the same time the next evening I was getting some exercise on my bicycle a few blocks from our house when I inadvertantly glanced at the crescent moon and it hit me that what I had seen the night before was backwards. I stopped right in front of the town gym where my wife and friends were playing volleyball at the time and my mouth came open as I realized that things were completely unexplainable. The crescent moon was on the right and the mouth was facing away from the setting sun just as is expected. But how could the crescent moon be reversed on the night of the 7th? I wondered if I was going crazy.

While I was standing there my wife and a close friend exited the gym and I pointed out to them that the crescent moon had been facing completely the opposite way the night before. Our young friend told me she saw the same phenomenon but hadn't thought about it until I mentioned it. Before the week was over I found out that a total of ten people including myself saw the crescent moon facing south on the 7th. But to be sure that we all saw the same thing I asked several of them to draw a picture of what they saw without telling them why. Each of the drawings I got back revealed a crescent moon with the mouth facing north and a star just to the right of the mouth of the moon!

I was dumbfounded. What does one make of this?