Blue Moon

Halloween Full Moon!

There was a rare full moon + blue moon for Halloween this year.  Did you see it?  Catch it waning tonight and for the rest of the week.  

Here’s more from CNET:

This Halloween’s Blue Moon Will Bring a Rare Treat to the Skies

For the first time since World War II, people in all parts of the world will be able to see the Oct. 31 display.

Halloween may look different this year due to coronavirus restrictions, but at least we can enjoy a spooky spectacle in the sky: a rare second-in-the-month full moon to cap off a month of glorious skywatching. 

The full moon that will be visible on Oct. 31 is called the blue moon because it’s the second full moon of the same month — following the harvest moon of Oct. 1 through Oct. 3. And in a rare treat, the 2020 Halloween full moon will be visible to the entire world, rather than just parts of it, for the first time since World War II.

“When I was teaching, my high school students thought a full moon occurred every Halloween,” astronomy educator and former planetarium director Jeffrey Hunt told me. Not quite, though pop culture decorations sure make it seem that way. The last Halloween full moon visible around the globe came in 1944, he said. He’s written about the event on his web site, When the Curves Line Up. There was a Halloween full moon for some locations in 1955, but that didn’t include western North America and the western Pacific, Hunt says. 

While this year’s Halloween full moon will be visible in all parts of the globe, that doesn’t mean every single citizen will have a view. Residents across both North America and South America will see it, as will Africa, all of Europe and much of Asia. But while Western Australians will see it, those in the central and eastern parts of the country will not. 

Know time zones well? “Every time zone has it except those east of (GMT) +8 time zones if they have daylight time, or (GMT) +9 with no daylight time,” Hunt says.

Want to see the Halloween full moon? It’s so bright at the full phase it doesn’t matter if you’re in a crowded city or out on the farm. And you don’t need pricey equipment.

“Walk outside, and take a look,” Hunt says. 

“Rare Full Flower Blue Moon” Rising Saturday, May 18. Get Your Seats.

It’s called the “Rare Full Flower Blue Moon.” In case you were wondering.  And it looks just like this:

 

From Farmers’ Almanac

On Saturday, May 18, 2019, at 5:11 p.m. Eastern Time, May’s Flower Moon officially turns full. This particular full Moon is also referred to as a “Blue Moon,” however some may be confused by this name. Most people know that we usually refer to a “Blue Moon” when we have two full Moons in a month.  There is, however, an alternate definition for a Blue Moon, which is what the Moon on May 18th is.

The Seasonal Blue Moon Definition

Typically, each of the four seasons contains three full Moons. However, sometimes a particular season will have four. When that happens, the third full Moon of that seasonal lunar quartet is designated as a Blue Moon (although no one is sure why the third, and not the fourth, is the one that gets the Blue Moon moniker).

In 2019, spring in the Northern Hemisphere runs from March 20th to June 21st. During that time span of slightly more than three months, these are the full Moon occurrences (in Eastern Time zones):

  1. Full Worm Moon: March 20, 2019
  2. Full Pink Moon: April 19, 2019
  3. Full Flower Moon: May 18, 2019 (Blue Moon)
  4. Full Strawberry Moon: June 17, 2019

That final full Moon falls before the summer solstice, so it’s not the first full Moon of summer, but rather the fourth full Moon of spring. That makes the May 18th Moon—the third of the four full Moons of spring—a “Blue Moon.” It will also be the last seasonal Blue Moon until August 22, 2021.

And no, it will not be blue in color!

Songs with Astronomical Themes No. 6: Blue Moon, Sung by Elvis

In honor of our own blue moon this week, here’s No. 6 in our Songs with Astronomical Themes series: “Blue Moon.”

Blue Moon Sheet Music
The song was written by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, the duo that wrote dozens of Broadway musicals and hundreds of popular songs. “Blue Moon” went through several incarnations, with different titles and lyrics, before this version was written and recorded in 1935.

Elvis Presley’s rendition, released by Sun Records in 1954, is one of my favorites. Have a listen. It borders on the bizarre, with the clop-clopping electric guitar, the over-the-top reverb, and and Elvis’s weird falsetto cooing at the end of each verse.

A blue moon, by the way, as in “once in a blue moon,” is an extra full moon in a season–commonly, the second full moon in a single month. So it’s a rare event, occurring every two or three years. A blue moon, however, is rarely blue.