With a little help from my friends Options

[MERovingian]

I need some astronomical help and do not know where to find it! So perhaps my buddies at Unmanned Spaceflight can point me in the right direction.
There it is:

I'm writing a story losely based upon my stay in Saudi Arabia, 12 light years ago. It starts on Christmas eve 1999 on the Eastern shores of the Red Sea (Jeddah). What I need to know is this: was it the full moon shining that night of the 24th/25th december 1999, the 16th of the month of RamadHaan? And if yes, from what time to what time?
It's a bit stupid, but if there was full moonlight around midnight, the story changes quite a bit.

I did quite a lot of research trying to find that out, no way. I surfed the net, I asked Christians and Muslims alike, no way! But I'm sure there must be, somewhere, a site where I can set the location, the time, etc and voila.

In advance, thank you all very much for your great help!

[Juramike]

Check out: http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/moonph...1999&n=1942

From the phase, you should be able to figure out moonrise/moonset. (Hint: Full moon is exactly opposite the sun in the sky)

[Astro0]

Use Stellarium www.stellarium.org
You can easily figure out time, date and location on Earth for your observation.

[siravan]

By definition, full moon would have been on Ramadan 14 (it is a lunar calender anyway). So, on 16th, it was two days after the full moon. For all practical literary purposes, you can assume that there was a full moon on that night (unless your characters had an urgent need to look at mare crisium). I guess the moonrise would have been around 7 pm.

[Phil Stooke]

And another resource:

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/vphase.html


Enter your century (!), year, month, day and time (use Universal time for this particular question since it's not in North America).


Phil

[bkellysky]

Sky and Telescope has an interactive sky map chart, so you can see what the sky actually looked like. Link is on the front page of skyandtelescope.com .
You can set the location with lat and long, local time and date and see what the sky looked like. (At 8pm at my place the moon was rising and Jupiter and Saturn were high in the southern sky.)

You'd need to register first.


No registration needed at http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/ for a simple sky map for a location, with time and date in GMT.

[MERovingian]

Many many many thanks to all of you for your help!

Suddenly, there is moonlight all other my characters!!! So, I'm heading right now back to the writing table!

Again, shookran jazilan everybody!