I see the moon and the moon sees me

At 11:08 this evening, M texted me, "Look at the moon outside."

Okay, I'll go outside because it would be difficult to look at the moon inside -- at this point I'm envisioning the scene from Despicable Me where the shrunken moon begins to grow big again while it's still inside the spaceship, or was it an airplane?  Inside would work in that instance.

Anyway, I went outside to look at the moon, and it was beautiful.  It definitely looked full to my untrained eye, but upon checking the online full moon calendar for 2012 (who knew?), I discovered that the actual full moon will occur Tuesday morning around 1:30 CST.

Even though this moon wasn't full, it was incredibly big and bright and there was a distinct lunar halo.  More internet searching explained that even though the sky surrounding the moon appears to be extremely clear, the halo is indicative of the presence of high, thin cirrus clouds, containing millions of ice crystals, drifting 20,00 feet or more overhead.  When the ice crystals are aligned exactly right, our eye sees the halo that the sparkle of the crystals creates.

What makes all of this even more amazing is that no two people will see the lunar halo in exactly the same way.  Even two people who are standing side by side will experience their own unique perspective of the halo.  So even though M and I both looked at the moon at almost the same time, she from Indiana and me from Illinois, her view of the lunar halo was subtly different from mine.

And to think that all along I assumed that, aside from differences in time zone, when we looked at the moon, we all saw the same thing.