Tropical Fish
It's probably the correlation between my mood and the full-moon which has something to do with my lifelong fascination with the moon. It's true that correlation does not imply causation. However, as diaries and calenders usually show when the full-moon, it's a correlation I've found fairly handy. So when I discovered a moon phase module I could add to my blogsite I thought I'd give it a try.
There were, however, a few problems. It's a bit light on useful data. I don't like javascript (or any client-side processing) and I certainly do not like pulling scripts and images from a server I don't own. But the main reason I decided that the moon phase module was not for my site was that it's wrong. Really. It's wrong.
But when the idea simply would not go away I got to work with my trusty copy of Perl. All the hard calculation work is handled by Astro::MoonPhase and graphics manipulation is handled by GD The images of the moon were downloaded (lifted) in gif format from the U.S. Naval Observatory (originally created by R. Schmidt from ray-traced images of the Moon). However, for some mysterious reason, when I told GD to read a file as a gif it tried to read as a jpeg and barfed - a quick bit of CLI foo turned everything into png format which GD seems to like.
So if you now look in the sidebar you can see the results of my efforts. Cool, eh?