Lunar phase refers to the appearance of the illuminated portion of the
Moon as seen by an observer, usually on Earth. The lunar phases vary cyclically as the Moon
orbits the Earth, according to the changing geometry of the Earth, Moon, and
Sun. One half of the lunar surface is always illuminated by the
Sun (except during
lunar eclipses), and is hence bright, but the portion of the illuminated hemisphere that is visible to an observer can vary from 100% (
full moon) to 0% (
new moon). The boundary between the illuminated and unilluminated hemispheres is called the
terminator.
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Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon."
See also
heisenbug.
True story: Once upon a time there was a
bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at
MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase.
GLS incorporated this routine into a
Lisp program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would
barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon!
The first paper edition of the
Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter "corrected" it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
[
Jargon File]
(1995-02-22)
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