July 27, 2004

Contacts:
Roger W. Sinnott, Senior Editor
855-638-5388 x146, [email protected]
Richard Tresch Fienberg, Editor in Chief
855-638-5388 x144, [email protected]

 

Note to Editors/Producers: This release is accompanied by a publication-quality photograph; see details below.

On Saturday evening, July 31st, a full Moon will rise for the second time this month (the first time was on July 2nd). Many people call the second full Moon in a calendar month a "blue Moon" and use the expression "once in a blue Moon" to mean something that occurs only rarely. While the latter meaning can be traced back centuries, the former definition is much newer — and it's wrong!

It is rare to have two full Moons in a single month. The reason is simple: the average time between full Moons is 29½ days. Thus February, with at most 29 days, can never accommodate two full Moons. To squeeze a pair into a month with 30 days, the first must occur on the 1st of the month. Months with 31 days, including July, can have two full Moons only if the first one occurs by the 2nd of the month, as happens in July 2004. The last time a calendar month included two full Moons was November 2001. Not until May 2007 (in North American time zones) or June 2007 (Europe) will it happen again.

If you want to tell your readers, listeners, or viewers that Saturday's full Moon is a blue Moon, go right ahead. Countless other newspapers, radio and TV stations, and Web sites will certainly do so. But be aware that, technically, every one of these reports will be in error! According to Canadian folklorist Philip Hiscock, the term "blue Moon" has been around for more than 400 years, but its modern calendrical meaning has become widespread only in the last 25. And as discovered five years ago, it can be traced to a mistake published in Sky & Telescope in the 1940s!

Sky & Telescope admitted to its "blue Moon blooper," an error that had crept onto the magazine's pages 53 years earlier, in its May 1999 issue, page 36; see also March 1999, page 52, and/or follow the links at the end of this press release. Hiscock and Texas astronomer Donald W. Olson helped the magazine's editors figure out how the 1946 mistake was made, and how the erroneous meaning of blue Moon (as the second full Moon in a month) eventually spread around the world. Before 1946, a blue Moon always meant something else. For example, says Hiscock, sometimes it referred to an obvious absurdity. Quite a few old songs use it as a symbol of sadness and loneliness. There's even a cocktail called a blue Moon; it's a mix of curaçao, gin, and perhaps a twist of lemon. And, exceedingly rarely, the Moon actually does turn blue in our sky — when powerful volcanic eruptions, fires, or storms throw huge quantities of dust into Earth's atmosphere.

Our 1946 writer, amateur astronomer James Hugh Pruett (1886–1955), made an incorrect assumption about how the term had been used in the Maine Farmers' Almanac, where it consistently referred to the third full Moon in a three-month season containing four. (By this definition there is no blue Moon in July 2004, and the next one happens in August 2005.)

There's no turning back now. The concepts of a blue Moon as the second full Moon in a month and the third full Moon in a season containing four are listed as definitions 1a and 1b, respectively, in the American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Co., 4th edition, 2000).


Sky & Telescope is making a publication-quality photograph of the full Moon available to the news media. Permission is granted for one-time, nonexclusive use in print and broadcast media, as long as appropriate credit (as noted in the caption) is included. Web publication must include a link to SkyandTelescope.com.

Full Moon

July 2004 has two full Moons, one on the 2nd and another on the 31st. The second full Moon in a month is often called a blue Moon, a definition that can be traced to an error in the March 1946 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine. Before then, a blue Moon always meant something else. Click on the image above to download a publication-quality version (1.3-megabyte JPEG) by anonymous FTP.

Photograph courtesy Gary Seronik, Sky & Telescope magazine.


Sky Publishing Corp. was founded in 1941 by Charles A. Federer Jr. and Helen Spence Federer, the original editors of Sky & Telescope magazine. The company's headquarters are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In addition to Sky & Telescope and SkyandTelescope.com, the company publishes Night Sky magazine (a bimonthly for beginners with a Web site at NightSkyMag.com), two annuals (Beautiful Universe and SkyWatch), as well as books, star atlases, posters, prints, globes, and other fine astronomy products.

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