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What type, what could the potential effects be, and why would this happen?

EDIT: Yes, I am talking about physics not the supernatural. I figured this would be obvious unless people thought I was joking around, the tides are effected I know that much so obviously there is something physical going on here and I know some electronics can be very sensitive at very 'small' levels (not sure if 'small' is there word I am looking for here).

Brian Carlton
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MetaGuru
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13 Answers13

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A long time ago I encountered a network (thin Ethernet) issue that turned out to be due to tide height in a river next to the building - to cut a long story short, the tide height affected the height of the ground water table below the building which, in turn, affected the ground/earth voltage level in different parts of the building, giving rise to changes in noise levels and earth loop currents. The fix was to arrange for better, common ground points.

As the moon's phase affects tidal flow, I would suggest that you could therefore say 'yes' to your question.

Linker3000
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    That is a fracking good answer. –  Feb 18 '11 at 03:18
  • I would argue that in Linker3000's answer the water level effected the circuit not the moon. Any means of changing the water level, i.e. rain, would have had the same effect on the circuit. I believe that one cannot conclude that the moon's gravity effected the circuit, to do so is a logical fallacy. There is a correlation between the tides and the circuit's operation, but, the tides are not the cause of the circuit's behaviour. – Dave.Mech.Eng Dec 05 '11 at 03:11
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    Tidal forces between the earth and moon have no relation with the phase of the moon. You get a moon phase because light emitted by the sun bounces off the moon and into your eye. Moon phases depends on the position of the sun, earth and you. Tidal forces do not depend on the sun's position. This should be enough to convince you that they are two entirely different phenomena. Therefore, the answer doesn't address the question. – Dave.Mech.Eng Dec 05 '11 at 03:13
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    Tides are very much affected by the phase of the Moon, as tide charts will reveal. During parts of each lunar cycle the difference between high and low tide will be much more significant than during other parts. I don't know the geography near the building described above, but in many places tidal effects are large relative to other things like rain. – supercat Feb 27 '12 at 20:24
  • My immediate response would have been "of course moon phase can't affect electronics". I have been well and truly educated, and slapped in the face, by this answer. The question and comments in general have been illuminating (see what I did there?) and entertaining. +1. – Simon Fitch Jun 26 '23 at 16:12
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Not the answer you were looking for but if you're designing electronics which will run ON the moon you'll have to take into account the big (~ 290 degrees C) temperature differences between the light and the dark phase.

Andre Holzner
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    Good answer! It's the questioner's responsibility to state such unguessable details as the electronics being on Earth or not :) – DarenW Dec 17 '10 at 21:09
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Yes:

1.) In case a design is so sensitive the miniscule influence of the moon (capacitance, inductance, luminosity, gravity, shielding from cosmic rays etc) leads to a change of results, it is reasonable to assume the moon might have an influence.

But this means a design mistake has been made in the first place. The influence of a person with an electric wristwatch will be way bigger probably. It means the electronics design is unreliable in the first place.

2.) It is darker in moonless nights, so with optical sensors feedback will be different. (or other types of sensors, for that matter)

3.) If your electronics are right on the waterfront of tidal waters, because tides are of a different height depending on the phase of moon, the effects of saltwater on the electronics might differ.

4.) Since there seems to be an influence of moon phase on people (even if only they believe there is), the interpretation of electronics results might be psychologically attributed to the moon (poor thing). Or maybe the users just use the stuff wrong.

posipiet
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There is no evidence whatsoever that the phases of the moon have any effect on electronic equipment, unless it is light-sensitive. It used to be thought that they affected human behaviour, which is where the word lunacy comes from, but studies have failed to show any associations.

Leon Heller
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    Not True! Precise Gravimeters will see the variation in the local gravity caused by the moon's gravity. – Connor Wolf Nov 05 '10 at 06:01
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    thats not the moon having an impact on the operation of your electronics, thats the moon's influence on gravity having an impact on your sensor reading. Regardless of the moons position your electronics are operating properly, you have to account for its impact on your sensor readings, aka a software problem. – Mark Nov 05 '10 at 23:21
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    Unless, if your electronics's behavior is dictated by sensors (like, well, almost everything). – Connor Wolf Nov 07 '10 at 04:49
  • Which sensors, apart from a superconducting gravimeter? – Leon Heller Nov 07 '10 at 09:11
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    A gravimeter is partly a mechanical device. Remove the mechanical component and it no longer responds to the tidal forces. – Dave.Mech.Eng Dec 05 '11 at 03:16
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I actually think the phase of the moon could have an effect on the noise level on an antenna. In satellite applications there is usually planned outages where the satellite you are talking to is in line with the sun. The noise from the sun is so great your system fails.

Now the moon would have much much much less noise, but I could see it still adding a bit of noise.

Kellenjb
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    I'm not sure about that. The Sun has an effect on your noise levels because it has magnetic explosions fairly often (and picking up now) that absolutely affect our electronics. (check out the movies taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO) The moon has no similar characteristics. If -if- there were any gravitational effects, the moon is SO MUCH SMALLER. – ArielP Nov 08 '10 at 13:13
  • I was thinking about a reflection off of the moon that changes based off of phase. – Kellenjb Nov 08 '10 at 17:36
  • Noise for one antenna user is signal for another. Some radio astronomers are watching the moon, waiting for noise pulses that are Cerenkov radiation due to neutrinos interacting with moon matter. So far they've observed nothing, last I heard. – DarenW Dec 17 '10 at 21:12
  • I don't think the moon is made of the right materials to be a very good reflector of RF energy. (In the bands relevant to radio reception, that is) – Nick Johnson Sep 26 '11 at 02:11
  • @Nick Johnson - the moon isn't a great reflector surface, but at least it's big. Moonbounce radio communication is real, and we can see with our eyes that the moon can reflect photons from strong emitters in the neighborhood. There are also the reflectors deployed by Apollo and various automated missions, though you have to aim the right source very carefully to get anything from those. – Chris Stratton Dec 03 '11 at 14:31
  • @ChrisStratton Neither of those applies to RF, though - the reflection characteristics of matter are very different for the wavelengths light and radio waves use. – Nick Johnson Dec 04 '11 at 03:52
  • @Nick Johnson - moonbounce (off the moon itself) has often been done at "RF" frequencies at least as low as 7Mhz all the way through microwaves, by both amateur radio operators and government organizations for communications, and of course also by research organizations. Not sure what the minimum usable frequency of the artificial reflectors is - chances are they are conductive, so it may be more an issue of building a transmitter that can illuminate a tiny target with enough power to get anything back, and having a suitable receiver. – Chris Stratton Dec 04 '11 at 16:37
  • @ChrisStratton I wasn't saying it was impossible - just that the fact the moon reflects light in the visible spectrum says little to nothing about its reflectivity in the RF spectrum. – Nick Johnson Dec 05 '11 at 22:29
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Maybe:

The moon can have a slight effect on perceived gravity; look at tides. If you had ultra precise accelerometers or devices for measuring this, then you might notice an effect due to the rotation or position of the moon. I am not sure though if just the phases would have an effect.

Thomas O
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    We used to measure drift in the fiber optic gyros... (earths rotation). It precesses too so the rate varies. Astronomers do care about ( and measure) all this, and for them, phase of the moon matters. It was a joke at university, then I worked for astronomers. We even had to compute the phase of the moon to schedule important observations for dark nights. Star trackers go a bit wonky with phase of the moon too. The best star trackers work even in daylight for navigation. Better than GPS... sort of. – Tim Williscroft Nov 04 '10 at 23:14
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The people at CERN did notice that the position of the moon has real effect on their equipment when they are using it to do their particle smashing. The reason is that even though the moon's effect is not much in terms of gravitational pull, the equipment at CERN is quite sensitive to many things. The beam of subatomic particles does get effected by the Moon and this has to be taken into consideration when doing the experiments.

quantum231
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    Quoting from [Effects of tidal forces on the beam energy in LEP](https://cds.cern.ch/record/250463): "Among those are terrestrial tides due to the Moon and Sun. They move the Earth surface up and down by as much as ~ 0.25m which represents a relative local change of the Earth radius of 0.04 ppm". In the end the [terrestrial tides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_tide) (i.e. solid ground moving up and down !) changed the circumference of the LEP accelerator slightly but measurably. – Andre Holzner Jun 17 '21 at 16:09
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In theory the gravity of the moon would cause small changes in very precise accelerometers and gyros. As a practical matter there are gravity deviations due to mountains, ore deposits and so on that would be larger. As these don't normally effect equipment, I doubt the moon does.

Jim C
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YES. A light sensing circuit would be affected by the amount of light reflected off the moon into the sensor. How bright it is at night depends on the phase of the moon. The hypothetical circuit would measure this. There are many such sensors: photodiode's, phototransitors, phototubes, etc... Here is an example of an existing circuit/product that would do this: http://unihedron.com/projects/darksky/ Of course their are many others.

Dave.Mech.Eng
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Yes: http://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_31.html#TAG1361

iow: If someone tries to print out the phase of the moon to aid in debugging and fails to do that in some situations.

dren.dk
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There is a list of relativistic effects of gravity and speed on clocks, including GPS clocks. Tidal potentials of the Moon is namely known. Amplitude of periodic effect is on the order of 1 ps. I dont know if its over the range of 1 day.

so yes.

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Sure, solar plants may produce less electricity during the night. Also the sun could be closed by moon directly - partially or fully - dramatically affecting solar plants power output via this event

Pinus
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Yes, it's one of Tesla's laws from over 100 years ago. You might have to ask yourself how Tesla was able to do so much without the help of "satellites in outer space" to actually understand what wireless energy is doing.

http://anengineersaspect.blogspot.com/2013/02/tesla-says-capacity-varies-with.html?m=1

John O'conner
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