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Image source, fake images
The best time to see the “Blue Moon” will be when the night of October 31 is darkest and the sky is clear.
It’s not actually blue. It is a full Moon, like any other, the color that most full moons are seen: pale gray, milky white or silver.
What makes this phenomenon strange, which folklore baptized as “Blue Moon” or “Blue Moon”, is that Since Lsome full in a single month, when it is normal to see one.
A lunar cycle, the period in which all the phases of the Moon occur, repeats every 29.5 days or so.
If it coincides that the full Moon occurs on the first or second day and the month has 31 daysThis is when a second full Moon is likely to appear.
This is known as “Blue Moon”.
The month of February, which is 28 days old, will never see one.
Image source, fake images
This is what the Blue Moon looked like behind the Capitol dome, in Washington DC in 2015.
When is the “Blue Moon” of 2020?
It is an unusual phenomenon that occurs every 2.5 years.
The last time it happened was on March 31, 2018.
This year it will appear in the sky on the night of October 31 to November 1, when many countries celebrate Hallowe’en and in Mexico the Day of the Dead holiday.
There was already a full Moon on October 1 and by the end of the month we will be able to see the second.
Image source, fake images
This year coincides with Halloween.
Why blue?
As NASA explains on its website, the definition of the blue moon emerged in the 1940s.
At that time the Maine Farmer’s Almanac (the most trusted source for all things climate for almost 200 years) offered a definition of the Blue Moon so convoluted that many astronomers had a hard time understanding it.
To explain the Lblue ones in plain language, Sky & Telescope magazine published an article in 1946 titled ‘Once every Blue Moon’. The author, James Hugh Pruett (1886-1955) quoted the 1937 Maine almanac and said, “The second (Full Moon) in a month, as I interpret it, is called the Blue Moon.”
This was not correct – assures NASA – but at least it could be understood.
Y thus the modern Blue Moon was born.
Image source, fake images
The Krakatoa volcano, in Indonesia, again expelled ash on April 11, 2020.
Moons and volcanoes
Although the one we will see was not a true blue Moon, there are moons of this color.
But they can only look blue after one volcanic eruption.
In 1883, after the Krakatoa volcano earthquake in Indonesia, people said that almost every night you could see Blue Moons.
With the force of the eruption, similar to a 100 megaton nuclear bomb, they rose high into the Earth’s atmosphere ash clouds whose particles made the Moon look blue.
There were also reports of Blue Moons in Mexico in 1983, after the El Chichón volcano eruption, and in Washington state in 1980, after the Mount Santa Helena eruption.
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