Harvest Moon

Every other night of the year the Moon rises about fifty minutes later than it did the night before. Around the September equinox it rises only twenty-five or thirty minutes later at mid-northern latitudes, and less than that further north — because the Moon's path is running at a shallow angle to the evening horizon, so a night's worth of eastward movement costs very little rising time. The result is several evenings in a row with a bright moon arriving just as the light goes, instead of the usual hour of darkness in between. Before tractors had headlights, that was the difference between getting a crop in and not.