Blue Moon on New Year's Eve

[Qbone]

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29dec_bluemoon.htm?list954663



Dec. 29, 2009: Party planners take note. For the first time in almost twenty years, there's going to be a Blue Moon on New Year's Eve.

"I remember the last time this happened," says professor Philip Hiscock of the Dept. of Folklore at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. "December 1990 ended with a Blue Moon, and many New Year's Eve parties were themed by the event. It was a lot of fun."

Don't expect the Moon to actually turn blue, though. "The 'Blue Moon' is a creature of folklore," he explains. "It's the second full Moon in a calendar month."


Most months have only one full Moon. The 29.5-day cadence of the lunar cycle matches up almost perfectly with the 28- to 31-day length of calendar months. Indeed, the word "month" comes from "Moon." Occasionally, however, the one-to-one correspondence breaks down when two full Moons squeeze into a single month. Dec. 2009 is such a month. The first full Moon appeared on Dec. 2nd; the second, a "Blue Moon," will come on Dec. 31st.


This definition of Blue Moon is relatively new.

If you told a person in Shakespeare's day that something happens "once in a Blue Moon" they would attach no astronomical meaning to the statement. Blue moon simply meant rare or absurd, like making a date for the Twelfth of Never. "But meaning is a slippery substance," says Hiscock. "The phrase 'Blue Moon' has been around for more than 400 years, and during that time its meaning has shifted."

The modern definition sprang up in the 1940s. In those days, the Farmer's Almanac of Maine offered a definition of Blue Moon so convoluted that even professional astronomers struggled to understand it. It involved factors such as the ecclesiastical dates of Easter and Lent, and the timing of seasons according to the dynamical mean sun. Aiming to explain blue moons to the layman, Sky & Telescope published an article in 1946 entitled "Once in a Blue Moon." The author James Hugh Pruett cited the 1937 Maine almanac and opined that the "second [full moon] in a month, so I interpret it, is called Blue Moon."

That was not correct, but at least it could be understood. And thus the modern Blue Moon was born.


Blue moon has other connotations, too. In music, it's often a symbol of melancholy. According to one Elvis tune, it means "without a love of my own." On the bright side, he croons in another song, a simple kiss can turn a Blue Moon pure gold.

The modern astronomical Blue Moon occurs in some month every 2.5 years, on average. A Blue Moon falling precisely on Dec. 31st, however, is much more unusual. The last time it happened was in 1990, and the next time won't be until 2028.

So cue up that old Elvis record and "enjoy the extra moonlight on New Year's Eve," says Hiscock. "It only happens once in a Blue Moon."


It has been also reported http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=114944&sectionid=3510212" New Year's Eve 2009 coincides with lunar eclipse.



So gear up residents of the SOTT.NET forum (it might have some meaning for someone somewhere in this planet!) Especially for Armageddonites and Apocalyptic maniacs.



:D



Happy New Year all…

 

[Argonaut]

Awesome, thanks for sharing this.

 

[ElizabethDempsey]

I'm sharing this useful and timely information from the Expansions.com website:

December 30, 2009

Blue Moon
Tomorrow night is New Year's Eve. It is also a night of a rare "Blue Moon". This occurs when there is a second full moon within the same calendar month. It is especially rare when it occurs on New Year's.

You can be assured that the Illuminati will take full advantage of this 13th full moon of the year by performing sexual magick rituals globally. The energy may feel strange or uncomfortable from now until New Year's Day.

Stay in violet and keep the brown merger at your pineal gland 24/7.

 

[henry]

Here is the explanation for the term 'Blue Moon' referred to in Qbone's post, the not easily understood explanation, that does not mean the second moon in one month... along with some info on calculating years

_http://www.panic.com/blog/2009/12/on-calendars/

This was the final question last week at Pub Trivia, and our team won the evening with the same answer to this question that almost everyone else gave, probably the answer you’ve heard before: a blue moon means two full moons in one calendar month. This month, December 2009, has a blue moon on the 31, since it also had a full moon on the 2nd. But I had the nagging feeling that I’d read or heard somewhere (probably on QI) that the popular definition is wrong, that the real blue moon isn’t that straightforward. When I got home, Google confirmed it: We were wrong, quizmasters and all.

This idea that a month with two full moons is unusual points out the incongruity between the lunar cycle and our familiar 12 month, 365 day calendar. Month and Moon are nearly the same word–why don’t they mean the same thing? The answer, of course, is that they once did. But nature seems to hate an integer* as much as it reportedly hates a vacuum, so a year isn’t an even 365 or 366 days or 12 orbits of the moon around the Earth; neither does the moon take exactly 29 or 30 days to go around. So the problem is one of successive approximation, dividing one number by another and dealing with the remainder.

A first approximation: the lunar calendar

The moon was a useful timekeeper, despite its reluctance to synchronize with the cycles of the seasons. Instead of having to remember “day 237 after the winter solstice is wheat-planting day”, a farmer simply knew that the eighth moon is the wheat-planting moon. The wheat didn’t care much if one year’s full moon was 11 days earlier (or 18 days later) than the last year’s. Before the unveiling of the Julian calendar in 45 BC (more on that later) nearly all cultures on the planet used a calendar based on the cycles of the moon. (The Mesoamericans are a notable exception, and that 2012 thing is complete malarkey. Just saying.)

So here’s the first rounding error: Twelve cycles of the moon take between 354 and 355 days, but it’s 365 or 366 days between winter solstices. Or in other words, every two or three years will have thirteen full moons in it instead of twelve. And this is where the “blue” moon comes in, the moon that’s different from the others. (Though at this time, months and moons were the same thing so there’s not any question of having two of one in the other.) If you have a Stonehenge or other primitive-but-awesome celestial observatory handy (robed druids included) to tell you exactly when the solstice occurs you’ll notice that the phase of the moon and the solstice just about line up every 19 years. (But not exactly. Again, nature versus integers.) And even if you don’t, you’d eventually notice that, on average, 7 of every 19 cycles of the seasons need 13 months instead of 12 to keep everything in sync, or you’ll planting your wheat at the wrong time of year.

One interesting exception to this is the Islamic calendar, which has twelve lunar months and doesn’t adjust to match the seasons. This calendar is used for civil and religious purposes; a separate solar calendar must be used for agriculture. An Islamic, or hijri, year is on average 354.36 days long, so their calendar shifts forward by around 11 days each year relative to the seasons. Ramadan isn’t just on different dates every year (which would be more alarming to us if we didn’t have to deal with Easter), it crosses the seasons and returns to the same time of year every 33 years. This also means their years are counting up around 3% faster than seasonal years: It’s currently 1430 AH in the Islamic calendar, but in the year 20874 (AH and AD) their years will “catch up” with ours.

Next approximation: the solar calendar

In the Roman Republic the months were determined, as in most other cultures at the time, by priests (or imams, robed druids, etc.) who announced the presence of a new moon–and thus a new month–just after sunset. (The word “calendar” comes from the Latin calare “to call out, announce”, by way of kalends, the first day of the Roman month.) The Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the Roman religion, had the additional task of determining how long the year would be, 12 or 13 months, and therefore which day of the week important holidays would fall on–important stuff for a superstitious lot like the Romans. Originally, this was a purely religious role, but by the middle of the first century BC Roman politics had become particularly nasty and the Pontifex Maximus could use the calendar as a political tool, choosing to add an extra month to years when allies were in power or denying an extra month to his enemies.

To what extent Julius Caesar did this after becoming Pontifex Maximus in 63 BC isn’t clear, but 17 years later, in 46 BC, Caesar reformed the calendar, taking the power to define the year away from the position. The Julian reform declared that the Roman Republic would use a 365 day calendar with an extra day every 4 years. (Sound familiar?) In other words, the year was approximated at 365 1/4 days. To align the new calendar with the equinox, though, he had to add another two months to the already extended year, making 46 BC 445 days long. Cicero called this “the last year of confusion”.

One last tweak: our modern calendar

By the end of the Middle Ages, it had become apparent that the Julian calendar had drifted away from the seasonal calendar. This distressed the Catholic Church terribly because the most important thing in the world for the Catholic Church was celebrating Easter on the correct day. It had spent the previous thousand years trying to sort it out and now it found that their calendar, the calendar that Caesar had set in motion 1600 years before, was missing the equinox by more than a week.

During this time, some very clever people had figured out that the Julian calendar was moving forward around 3 days every 400 years, and came up with a modification to the leap year scheme: Every 100 years would not be a leap year, except for every 400 years. (You may remember that 2000 was a double exception year–it wouldn’t have been a leap year, but it was. So if you weren’t paying attention, you didn’t really miss anything.) In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII announced a reform of the calendar, the new leap year scheme along with a 10-day shift to get the calendar synced back up with the seasons.

The Church and a number of Catholic countries adopted the new calendar on Friday, October 15th of 1582, one day after (Julian) Thursday, October 4th. Protestant Europe resisted this papist conspiracy until the 18th century; the British Empire (including the American colonies) saw Thursday, September 14th follow Wednesday the 2nd in 1752. Sweden tried to make a gradual change by ignoring leap years until their calendar matched the Gregorian, but lost its nerve and switched back to the Julian calendar after 12 years. To make up for a day gained in the interim, they added a 30th of February to 1712. In Alaska, the change took place in 1867 when US took possession of the territory from Russia, which still used the Julian calendar. Because the international date line shifted at the same time, Friday, October 6th was followed by another Friday, the 18th of October.

Time in the future

Modern astronomy tells us that a year is, to within one day in a million years, 365.242199 days long. The Julian calendar put 1 year as 365.25 days, for an error of 7.8 days per 1000 years. The Gregorian calendar put 1 year as 365.2425 days, for an error of 0.3 days every 1000 years. The astronomer Sir John Herschel proposed that the year 4000 and every 4,000th year after should not be a leap year in order to reduce this remaining error to about half a day every 10,000 years, but the standard has not yet been adopted. New calendars have been proposed (mostly to solve the problem of figuring out which day of the week any given date is) but the Gregorian calendar’s ordering of leap years is sufficient to keep the calendar aligned to the seasons as far into the future as we need.

Well, almost. At this scale we begin to see that the speed at which the Earth rotates on its axis isn’t constant, or even predictable. The pull of the moon’s gravity is slowing the rotation of the Earth, making each day longer by a fairly constant 2.3 milliseconds per century, but other factors, most notably shifting mass on and inside the planet, add to or subtract from this by a different amount every year. Since 1967, when the length of a second was standardized in precise atomic terms, days have been between 0.3 and 1 ms longer than the traditional 24 * 60 * 60 = 86,400 seconds. As a result, every once in a while astronomers add a “leap second” to UTC, Coordinated Universal Time. Surprisingly, while just about every year between 1972 and 1999 required a leap second to keep the clock synchronized with the Earth’s rotation, there have only been two leap seconds added in the last ten years. The Earth has sped up just a bit, and no one knows why.

Blue Moons

The article that told me I was wrong about what “blue moon” means (and hilariously refers to that definition as “trendy”) explains that the “two full moons in a month” definition is due to a misreading of the Maine Farmers’ Almanac: the real Blue Moon is the third full moon in a season that has four full moons. Why the third? The first full moon of the season is particularly significant; e.g., the Easter moon. The moons before and after have names as well–the Lent Moon precedes the Easter Moon, whether it’s the third or fourth moon of the winter–so the third moon of four is the extra one. By this definition, 2009 does not have a blue moon, since the full moon on December 31st is after the solstice and belongs to next year’s winter.

For an example of the importance of the sequence of the moons to daily life, consider Charlemagne’s naming of the months of the year (a solar year, but even so), used for over 700 years after his death:

Wintarmanoth, winter month
Hornung, the month when the male red deer sheds its antlers
Lentzinmanoth, Lent month
Ostarmanoth, Easter month
Wonnemanoth, love-making month
Brachmanoth, plowing month
Heuvimanoth, hay month
Aranmanoth, harvest month
Witumanoth, wood month
Windumemanoth, wine month
Herbistmanoth, autumn harvest month
Heilagmanoth, holy month

One etymology claims “blue” comes from belewe, “betrayer”. Imagine if an extra moon showed up and delayed Wonnemanoth for 29 days. Betrayer moon!

A: The third of four full moons in a season

The next day I emailed the quizmaster to let her know how we were all terribly, horribly wrong, that we’d need to recount the scores, possibly have a do-over. She said they’d take either answer.

* A Correction

“Nature hates integers” is a gross oversimplification and ignores not just all of chemistry, where everything happens in even ratios, but the surprising phenomenon of orbital resonance. Pluto and Neptune, for example, are phase-locked in a stable 2:3 resonance: Pluto orbits the sun exactly twice for every three of Neptune’s orbits, and has for millions of years. Our moon’s rotation is locked to its orbit around the Earth due to tidal forces, which is why we only ever see one side of it. For the same reason, the Earth’s rotation is also slowing down and will eventually match the orbit of the moon. At that point, billions of years from now, both a day and a month will last for around 47 of our current 86,400-second-long days. One side of the Earth will face the moon; the other will never see it again.

The article this author got his information from is here:

_http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/objects/moon/3304131.html?page=1&c=y

What's a Blue Moon?

The trendy definition of "blue Moon" as the second full Moon in a month is a mistake.

by Roger W. Sinnott, Donald W. Olson, and Richard Tresch Fienberg

Recent decades have seen widespread popular embrace of the idea that when a calendar month contains two full Moons, the second one is called a "Blue Moon." The unusual pattern of lunar phases in early 1999 — two full Moons each in January and March, and none at all in February — triggered a groundswell of public interest. Countless newspapers and radio and TV stations ran stories about Blue Moons.
In an article "Once in a Blue Moon", folklorist Philip Hiscock traced the calendrical meaning of the term "Blue Moon" to the Maine Farmers' Almanac for 1937. But a page from that almanac belies the second-full-Moon-in-a-month interpretation.

With help from Margaret Vaverek (Southwest Texas State University) and several other librarians, we have now obtained more than 40 editions of the Maine Farmers' Almanac from the period 1819 to 1962. These refer to more than a dozen Blue Moons, and not one of them is the second full Moon in a month. What's going on here?

Blue Moons and the Seasons

Several clues point to a strong connection between the almanac's Blue Moons and the four seasons of the year. All of the listed Blue Moons fall on the 20th, 21st, 22nd, or 23rd day of November, May, February, or August. These dates fall about a month before the Northern Hemisphere winter and summer solstices, and spring and fall equinoxes, respectively, which occur on similar day numbers.

Although the idea of a seasonal pattern suggested itself to us immediately, verifying the details required a lot of detective work. We found that the Blue-Moon definition employed in the Maine Farmers' Almanac is indeed based on the seasons, but with some subtle twists.

Instead of the calendar year running from January 1st through December 31st, the almanac relies on the tropical year, defined as extending from one winter solstice ("Yule") to the next. Most tropical years contain 12 full Moons — three each in winter, spring, summer, and fall — and each is named for an activity appropriate to the time of year (such as the Harvest Moon in autumn). But occasionally a tropical year contains 13 full Moons, such that one season has four rather than the usual three.

Today we usually mark the beginning of the seasons when the Sun's celestial longitude passes 0° (spring), 90° (summer), 180° (autumn), and 270° (winter). The Sun appears to move along the ecliptic at a variable rate because of the Earth's not-quite-circular orbit, so the seasons defined this way are not equal in duration. Another approach uses the dynamical mean Sun or fictitious mean Sun — imaginary bodies that move along the ecliptic and the celestial equator, respectively, at a constant rate and produces seasons of equal length. The Maine almanac defines the seasons using this alternative method.

The almanac also follows certain rules laid down as part of the Gregorian calendar reform in 1582. The ecclesiastical vernal (spring) equinox always falls on March 21st, regardless of the position of the Sun. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, 46 days before Easter, and must contain the Lenten Moon, considered to be the last full Moon of winter. The first full Moon of spring is called the Egg Moon (or Easter Moon, or Paschal Moon) and must fall within the week before Easter.

At last we have the "Maine rule" for Blue Moons: Seasonal Moon names are assigned near the spring equinox in accordance with the ecclesiastical rules for determining the dates of Easter and Lent. The beginnings of summer, fall, and winter are determined by the dynamical mean Sun. When a season contains four full Moons, the third is called a Blue Moon.

Why is the third full Moon identified as the extra one in a season with four? Because only then will the names of the other full Moons, such as the Moon Before Yule and the Moon After Yule, fall at the proper times relative to the solstices and equinoxes.

Questions and Answers

During the period 1932 to 1957, under the editorship of Henry Porter Trefethen (1887-1957), the Maine Farmers' Almanac consistently listed Blue Moons derived from the convoluted seasonal rule just described. So where did the modern convention — that a Blue Moon is the second full Moon in a calendar month — come from? Sky & Telescope has, and is, the answer!

Laurence J. Lafleur (1907-66) of Antioch College, Ohio, discussed Blue Moons in a question-and-answer column in Sky & Telescope, July 1943, page 17, citing the 1937 Maine Farmers' Almanac as his source. It is clear that Lafleur had a copy of the almanac at his side as he wrote, since he quoted word for word the commentary on the August 1937 calendar page. This commentary notes that the Moon occasionally "comes full thirteen times in a year," but Lafleur did not judge whether this referred to a tropical year or a calendar year. More important, he did not mention the specific dates of any Blue Moons and never said anything about two full Moons in one calendar month.

Oops!

Some three years later, in March 1946, an article entitled "Once in a Blue Moon" appeared in Sky & Telescope (page 3). Its author, James Hugh Pruett (1886-1955), was an amateur astronomer living in Eugene, Oregon, and a frequent contributor to S&T. Pruett wrote on a variety of topics, especially fireball meteors. In his article on Blue Moons, he mentioned the 1937 Maine almanac and repeated some of Lafleur's earlier comments. Then, unfortunately, he went on to say, "Seven times in 19 years there were — and still are — 13 full moons in a year. This gives 11 months with one full moon each and one with two. This second in a month, so I interpret it, was called Blue Moon."

Pruett must not have had the 1937 almanac handy, or he would have noticed that the Blue Moon fell on August 21st (obviously not the second full Moon that month) and that 1937 had only 12 full Moons. But only in retrospect is his error so obvious.

Modern Folklore

Sky & Telescope adopted Pruett's new definition, using it in a note entitled "'Blue' Moons in May" on page 176 of the May 1950 issue. In a bizarre twist, the data on lunar phases for this note came from none other than H. Porter Trefethen of Winthrop, Maine, editor of the very almanac Pruett misread four years earlier! But Trefethen himself never called the second full Moon in a month a Blue Moon. The "'Blue' Moons" headline was likely added by Sky & Telescope's founding editor, Charles A. Federer Jr. Federer agreed that he probably wrote that headline with Pruett's then-recent article in mind and without consulting Trefethen.

As Hiscock explained in the March issue, widespread adoption of the second-full-Moon-in-a-month definition followed its use on the popular radio program StarDate on January 31, 1980. We examined this show's script, authored by Deborah Byrd, and found that it contains a footnote not read on the air that cites Pruett's 1946 article as the source for the information. Byrd now writes for the radio program Earth & Sky, whose Web site contains a note giving her perspective on this modern contribution to lunar folklore.

With two decades of popular usage behind it, the second-full-Moon-in-a-month (mis)interpretation is like a genie that can't be forced back into its bottle. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Rather than argue over whether to celebrate the dawn of the new millennium on January 1st in 2000 or 2001, those with the sunniest outlooks will celebrate twice. Why not treat Blue Moons the same way, marking both the second full Moon in a calendar month and the third full Moon in a season with four? "Even if the calendrical meaning is new," said Federer, "I don't see any harm in it. It's something fun to talk about, and it helps attract people to astronomy."

 

[Vulcan59]

Hi Elizabeth,

Could you clarify for me what is meant by "Stay in violet and keep the brown merger at your pineal gland..." and how does one go about doing it?