Learning How To See The Moon

On the value of observational drawing

visual essay by Megan Gafford

published by Drawing Never Dies

July 22, 2025

I once spent six months drawing the moon every night. Sometimes I would set up my large telescope to see its craters in detail, so close that I would watch the moon drift out of view, periodically adjusting my lenses to follow it. When I was too busy or tired, I would sketch it using only the naked eye, capturing its angle and phase in a simple diagram. Most of the time, I attached my astronomy binoculars to a tripod to capture as much detail as I could in a couple hours. The first time I saw the moon through a pair of astronomy binoculars, at the observatory outside Baton Rouge, discovering the finer details of that familiar circle made my heart race — the topography of an entirely separate world, gleaming silver in the mandatory darkness shrouding the observatory.

All of us are accustomed to the phases of the waxing and waning moon, with its variety of crescent-shapes. But not everyone notices that the moon also rises in the sky nearly an hour later each night. Because the Earth is spinning on its axis, twirling around its center like a ballerina on pointed toe, our view of the sky changes as the planet beneath our feet points us in different directions. That is why both the moon and sun appear to rise in the east and set in the west, as this visual effect is caused by the direction of the Earth’s rotation. Imagine if the ballerina decided to twirl left instead of right, and how that would make the room appear to her in the opposite order.

At the same time, the moon is orbiting around the Earth, so that when our planet spins us ’round to see it again each night, we have to rotate a bit longer to catch up with the moving moon. It’s as if the room around the ballerina was also slowly rotating in the same direction as her, so that as she twirls, it takes her a moment longer to face the same side of the room again. For those six months of nightly drawing, this meant that my routines and sleep also chased after the moon, syncing the rhythm of my life to its cycle, as I became more or less nocturnal depending on where the moon was in its orbit.

Trying to visualize celestial movements can feel mind-boggling — the moon is a spinning orb circling a larger spinning orb, hurtling together around a rotating fireball that drags them all in a giant loop around an unfathomable hole in the center of our galaxy — but as my own body fell into step with the moon's orbit, tracking its motion became more intuitive. Upon embarking on this project, I expected to learn the details of the moon's face by drawing its portrait over and over again, but I had not anticipated how my observations would help me develop a more accurate mental model of our moving solar system. Prolonged observation teaches us how to see, so that until we have looked hard, we cannot know what we have hitherto been blind towards.

Photography produces more accurate images, but it cannot teach you how to see nearly so well as observational drawing. Had I snapped a photo of the moon every night, then I could have never known it intimately — like how sex brings you far closer to another person than sharing a kiss. I wanted to consummate the love affair that I began with the moon on that humid Louisiana night, to caress its face with my pencil until I knew its every pore.

You can take a photo in an instant but then hardly register all the information it contains, whereas observational drawing demands that you choose where to place each line and dot, repeatedly comparing reality to every square centimeter of the emerging image, then changing the drawing to better match what you are looking at. When I teach drawing, I explain to students that the process is like those puzzles in children's coloring books that present two nearly identical pictures and ask you to spot ten subtle differences between them; except in observational drawing, as you spot discrepancies, you correct them. Even when students fail at realism, after spending hours carefully observing their subject, they see it more clearly than if they had snapped an accurate photo, and that clearer vision helps them draw better on their next attempt.

It would have been easier to draw the moon by looking at a photograph, where my fingers would have never stiffened from hours spent drawing outdoors on frosty nights. Photography does the hard work of flattening the moving, three-dimensional world into two static dimensions. This is how Photorealists, like the painter Chuck Close, held the world still long enough to recreate it as accurately as the photos their paintings were based on. Otherwise, even if drawing a still life that supposedly sits still, every time artists move their heads, they see their subject from a slightly different angle, and over the course of an hours-long drawing, light changes from morning to evening, shifting shadows and colors. Admiration for Photorealism stems largely from appreciating how keenly those painters observed their photographs, which is indeed masterful, but they did not have to grapple with what the Impressionist ringleader Claude Monet called “the most fugitive effects” of nature.

The Impressionists learned how to see ephemerality. Their loose brushstrokes evidence their attempts at capturing transitory light and their commitment to working en plein air, so that they painted the light while observing it in the same landscape they were depicting. And they were active when photography, a technology that also captures photons in a fleeting moment, had only just become widespread. It compelled them to probe how both humans and machines see light, with the Italian Impressionist Federico Zandomeneghi complaining in 1895 that “These days, Degas abandons himself entirely to his new passion for photography.” But Edgar Degas had but a brief liaison with photography before returning to painting within the year — he knew that photography could not replace observational drawing and painting.

And so, when I wanted to learn how to see the moon, I needed to watch how it moved, to view moonlight through gliding clouds and falling rain or snow. Peering into a telescope was like donning powerful eyeglasses to better see my beloved beside me, whereas drawing from a photo would have felt like pining after a long-distance romance while gazing into a locket. Lovers ache for proximity.

If only I could be close enough to touch the moon, to sit on the edge of a crater and try to capture the fugitive nature of light playing across its silver surface. No astronaut's photo can show me what it is like to gaze upon a moonscape. For you cannot see a thing until you draw in its presence.