Moons

There was a lunar eclipse today. It was not visible in North America but the folks down in Australia must have had a romantic night. It’s pretty amazing to have the moon tell the sun to bug off. Seeing that all the moon does is reflect the sun’s rays all year long, I think once in a blue moon, there should be an eclipse.

Talking about blue moons, did you know blue moons happen more frequently than the phrase “once in a blue moon” makes it sound? A blue moon occurs – according to Google – every 2.7154 years approximately.

Don’t believe me? Google “once in a blue moon”. If do not know physics, this may not make much sense to you. The answer, in hertz, basically tells you the frequency of blue moons occurring – hertz means “cycles per second”. But we don’t want to know that. We want to know when the next one will occur – “seconds per cycle”. Well, we can google it. Voila. About 85 million seconds but thanks to Google Calculator for prettifying the result for us.

Still blue moons are scarce? Yeah, I thought as much. Blue moons occur more frequently than we think they do. But we cannot see them because duhh… the sky goes dark blue – DARK AND BLUE! Perfect camouflage. I would have told you when the next one is occurring but astronomers remain perplexed as there is no disturbance in atmospheric conditions.

Another thing you may not know is full moons. Oh, those sky balls are sly. It is appointed to every month once to have a full moon and after that, halves and crescents. Some sneaky months though grab two full moons just for themselves. That is two full moons in a month! There are only 41 of these double-moon-stealing months in a century – talk about rare…

Conclusion, the true blue moon – according to what is meant by the phrase – occurs in a month that has two full moons where one of them is blue. Now that is rare.

p.s: and if I convinced you about the blue moon occurrence, is it safe to also conclude that Google runs your life?