This week: It's Not a Blue Moon, Part I Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.
—George Carlin
Oh, don't let's ask for the moon. We've already got the stars.
—Bette Davis
Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
—Buddha |
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When I was a kid, my father was fond of the expression, "once in a blue moon," which I understood to be "pretty rarely," only more poetic. But when I asked him what a "blue moon" was, he didn't have much of an answer. That would, it turned out, have to wait until the internet became a thing, at which point I looked it up... and found one of the early examples of false information being promulgated on the internet.
In brief, the true definition is this: a Blue Moon is the name assigned to the third full moon in a season containing four full moons. The next time this will occur will be not this year, but next: on August 19, 2024.
A different definition, however, has come into prominence, one which, it turns out, is based on misinformation published in a magazine in the late 1940s. While some insist this definition, based on Gregorian calendar months, is an "alternative" definition, I find it to be nothing more than the promulgation of an error. People who know me know that this is my hill to die on: to return the "blue moon" to its rightful place in the march of the seasons.
The various people who gave names to full moons, including European Celtic and, independently, Native American tribes, did so before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar or its direct predecessor, the Julian. Those calendars, with their origin in what is now Italy, are entirely solar: their purpose is to align the year with the solar return, so that the Sun is in close to the same position relative to the background stars when each year turns over. Our calendar's "months" are wholly divorced from the original meaning of "month," which has to do with the time from a moon phase to the next return of that moon phase.
But to the people who bothered naming full moons, that naming served a purpose, one similar to our naming of the purely arbitrary April, May, June, etc.: to mark one's position in the year. But, one might ask, relative to what? Well, various cultures (apparently independently) figured out a long time ago how to calculate the solar positions of solstice and equinox, whose moments grew to define seasons. For evidence of these calculations, one need look no further than sites such as Stonehenge, or various Mayan calendar stones.
While the definition of "season" itself can depend on context, and on location, for our purposes, I'm using "season" to mean the period between solstice and equinox, or vice-versa.
Most of the time, each season sees three full moons. That's where we get those popular moon names, all translations from earlier cultures: Harvest Moon, Blood Moon, Cold Moon, and so on. Popularly, you'll see something like "the Wolf Moon is the full moon in January" of the Gregorian calendar, but as the solstice occurs in December, the Wolf Moon occurs in January only about 2/3 of the time. Other times, it occurs sometime between the solstice (usually around December 21) and January 1.
But the orbital periods of Earth and Moon don't line up, so sometimes, instead of the three full moons in a season, you get four. You can think of one of them as a kind of leap moon, used to ensure that the seasonal definitions are maintained from solar year to solar year. This leap moon, the Blue Moon, is the third in a four-full-moon season. This happens roughly every 2.5 solar years, hence the rarity implied by "once in a blue moon."
There was a year not so long ago when we had two full moons in January, none in February, and two again in March. A recurrence isn't rare if it happens twice in three calendar months. That by itself should have ended the mistaken notion that calls a "blue moon" the second full moon in a Gregorian calendar month... but it didn't.
Next time, I'll delve more deeply into why this matters. Until then, don't forget to take the time to gaze at the moon whenever you can, no matter what you call it. |
Some fantasy for your perusal, perhaps even by moonlight:
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Last time, in "Under the Sea" , I talked about oceans.
BIG BAD WOLF is hopping  : Sorry, but I try to avoid Jamaican crabs. Lol!
Haven't really delved under the waves, but maybe I need to grab a sea elf or triton.
I wouldn't know what to do with a mermaid if I did catch one.
Elycia Lee ☮  :  Someone thinking a giant squid to be a Kraken made me laugh. Instead of moving to Mars when Earth is doomed, maybe swallowed by the sea, perhaps we should adjust to living underwater, grow gills or something... That would be a cool story to read.
Might work, at least until the oceans boil off.
Aennaytte: Free & Wild in GoT  : Doesn't it kind of ruin the fantasy when someone ends up producing a realistic, believable photo of a cryptid? We didn't need to know that the Kraken is as real as submarines.
Recently, there was a family in Las Vegas that said aliens had landed in their backyard. At least they had the common sense to present blurry photos with no discernable details to be made out. That's how you prove the unbelievable!
Science never makes things less interesting.
And that's it for me for July! Come back in four weeks for Part II, and until then...
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: July 26, 2023 Issue [#12086]
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