Solar eclipse: when TV gets it wrong

During dinner this evening, I caught part of Robin Hood on the ABC. (My internet-fu and ABC's handy iView tells me it was episode 1 of season 3, if you're interested.) Part of this episode involved a solar eclipse. I don't have a problem with solar eclipses. I don't object to them often having mystical significance or being used as a plot device.

What I do object to is the creators investing all their efforts into the CGI-ing of the eclipse (link to screen-cap) and not stopping to think about the immediate consequences. What am I talking about? Not five minutes after the eclipse has passed, we see Robin Hood standing on the battlements doing some heroic arrow firing with a backdrop of blue sky and a half-moon over his left shoulder.

A half moon. Right after a solar eclipse. What. The.

If you're feeling slightly lost at this point, allow me to explain. A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly between the Earth and the sun. By a happy coincidence, the angular size of the moon in the sky is approximately the same as the size of the sun. This means that the moon, when passing in front of the sun, can cover it neatly and completely.

Anyone who has stared at the moon for any reasonable length of time will have noticed that it doesn't move around the sky all that quickly. More quickly than stars, maybe, but certainly not halfway across the sky in the space of five minutes. Five minutes after the moon has passed in front of the sun, it's still going to be near the sun in the sky. This means that, since it's day time, it will cease to be visible as the illuminated side of the moon—the part facing the sun—is most certainly not facing the Earth since it just passed between sun and Earth. For there to be a half-full moon in the sky, it needs to be about 90º away from the sun which amounts to about halfway across the sky.

Would it really have been so hard to photoshop (or whatever the movie equivalent is) the moon out of that shot? Really?

People not thinking these sorts of things through make me angry. Especially since lots of people must have been paid to think about the solar eclipse and they all apparently forgot about the mundane moon in the sky.