I was searching online a couple of months back about the moon affecting buck movement and ran across this radio collar study that had been conducted to test the accuracy of solunar forecast tables. Turns out JoeRE had seen and posted on the same research project:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=36561&hilit=moon+telemetry#p521145What I took away from the study was that there is an affect on deer movement from the moon...although that doesn't necessarily mean that movement happens in front of my stand.
Without going into all the nitty-gritty, the study showed a general increase in activity/movement that peaked at Overhead & Underfoot times around the first and last Quarter moons and Moonrise and Moonset times around the Full and New moons. As it pertains to solunar tables, this results in the solunar table forecasts being spot on half of the time and...we'll say misleading....half of the time. The study goes into more detail about this and says it has a lot to do with terminology. For example, "Minor feed times" correspond with moon rise & set in those charts, but per the study, on days close to the full and new moons the increased activity was greatest around the moon rise & set times, therefore the "minor feed times" would be
better than the "major feed times" on those days....hence misleading terminology.
Back to the content of this thread, to get the "Moon Dates", I've been taking these two rules of thumb (if you will) and circling dates on the calendar where these conditions align close to sunrise or sunset. And as someone mentioned, I've already got September 20th circled.