Can the Moon be upside down?

The difference between these orientations happens gradually. When you travel just a short distance from the equator, the Moon will still rise more or less due east and set more or less due west, and in between will appear almost directly overhead. But as you travel farther north or south, it will start to appear farther south or north in the sky, respectively.

This is all a bit tricky to wrap your head around, especially when you take into account the slight changes that Earth’s tilted axis creates, plus all the various moving parts: Earth rotating, the Moon orbiting the Earth, and the Earth orbiting the Sun. It’s a great reminder that even something as seemingly simple as our Moon is part of a complex and dynamic system.

This phenomenon happens with other celestial objects as well, as long as they lie near Earth’s orbital plane (which the Moon lies near, though not on). Jupiter, for instance, can look upside down from the north pole compared to how it looks from the south pole. What’s more, its stripes look horizontal when seen near the horizon in both the northern and southern hemispheres of Earth, but from the equator a rising Jupiter’s stripes are vertical.

from The Planetary Society Articles https://ift.tt/3ctP8Fv
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