a nod to the old moon

You hear people speak of the 'new moon', that slender crescent that appears just after sunset every lunar month. But it's less common to hear of the 'old moon'. That's because most of us are asleep when it shows up, rising in the east just before dawn.

The old moon (waning crescent) looks little different from the new, a silvery sliver of a fingernail. But it appears in the east rather than the west, in the early morning rather than the early evening, and it seems to lead the sun up over the horizon, while the new moon seems to follow the sun down below the horizon.