By rotation of your iPhone 8, have a look into the exif metadata
fortytwo has a interesting argument, at least at face value, but this merits further investigation. The assumptions made do not quite square up with how phone cameras work, and they do not match even a rudimentary consideration of the scenario.
First and foremost, we need to understand how camera orientation is accounted for in modern JPEGs. There is actually an orientation metadatum in the EXIF of one of the two files:
Filename - IMG_1776 - Copy.jpg
Orientation - Right top
XResolution - 72
YResolution - 72
ResolutionUnit - Inch
DateTime - 2020:12:08 12:35:07
[...]
This page by Calvin Hass explains the different rotations quite well, so I'll skip it here for brevity. The take-home message is that the iPhone's camera app itself acknowledges that the photograph
should be rotated.
Now, what many people miss is that most modern software
will already perform that rotation for you. This is true of my Web browser, Windows 10's photo viewing thingamajig, and it is optional (enabled by default) in IrfanView.
So, let's see what happens if I strip all EXIF data from these photographs. I am avoiding any other interaction with the photos, simply running
exiftool -all= * on a directory that contains them (do try it at home!). The result is just plain JPEG data, plus some metadata that Windows insisted on immediately regenerating:
Alternatively, you can replicate these results by ignoring EXIF rotation data in IrfanView [Options -> Properties -> JPG / PCD / GIF -> Auto-rotate image according to EXIF info (if available)]. You should see pretty much the same result.
While the two moon images now make more intuitive sense when viewed this way (They match, right? That sounds like something we'd want), the second now-unrotated photo doesn't make much sense overall - the gradient of the sky is now sideways, which we can safely assume was not the case in real-life observation. It therefore appears that the rotation performed by our browsers was helpful, and reversing it does not bring us closer to answering the question.
A couple of hypotheses could be presented:
- The first photo lacks an orientation tag. It may be that this wasn't saved by the camera due to a bad reading from the magnetometer/accelerometer, and it is this photo that we should be rotating until the two moons match. However, this would directly contradict the dimensions of the two images as highlighted by fortytwo - we'd have to assume that both are incorrect, rather than that both are correct. I would therefore posit that fortytwo's analysis is flawed, short of multiple simultaneous technical failures in the phone used. In fact, this analysis brings up more problems than it solves - as the position of these celestial bodies changes relative to the observer over the course of the day, you would rather expect that the angle at which the moon is being viewed would have changed.
- Let's assume that the photographs are presented the right way up in the OP (i.e. the phone didn't fail, and the photos were not tampered with). The photos are separated by 9 hours in time, and 160 degrees in direction the camera was facing (rather obviously). OP's question was why the moon appears to be above the sun. The RE answer would be "well, that's because it is - the sun is only about to rise in a few hours, while the moon is already prominently visible in the sky". The FE answer, surprisingly, would not be very different. Since the sun appears not to yet have risen (due to EA), its rays would naturally illuminate the moon from "the bottom". This is consistent both with the time (3:45AM) and direction (107° clockwise from North, i.e. roughly East) the photographer was facing. It looks like not-quite-morning-yet because that's precisely what it was. Similarly, the second photograph is taken at 12:30 PM, and the photographer is facing 268° away from North, i.e. West. The moon is getting close to setting, and the sun is firmly up in the sky. It looks like the moon is setting and the sun is high up because they are.
tl;dr: the photos likely do not need further rotation (already sorted out for you by modern software), it stands to reason that the OP's observation was accurate, and the observation wasn't particularly surprising regardless of whether you're a RE'er or FE'er. A Cheshire moon is perfectly expectable in winter