It is a Blue Moon tonight at 9 pm Eastern.
For some of us, but not everyone, strangely enough.
At least if you're in the Americas. Rest of the world sees this full moon, on June 1st and has a blue moon in June instead. They have full moons June 1st and 30th, whereas the US has full moons May 2nd and 31st.
That is even rarer than a normal Blue Moon, but not amazingly so,
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There was an NPR article yesterday in which the interview Sky and Telescope magazine, who originally gave that definition of blue moon. Which turns out not to be correct.
Blue Moon on Thursday? Not So Fast
The wiki I linked to explains this.
It is an arbitary definition due to the solar year and the lunar year being incommensurate and therefore there being 13 full moons in some 12 month calendar years.
What Steinn and I liked about the Sky and Telescope story on NPR was: (1) admitting that one was wrong is refreshing, both for journlists and scientists; (2) J. Kelly Beatty, editor-in-chief, went to Caltech (he and I were in Ruddock House in the same years).
So, what's rarer than a transatlantic Blue Moon? And how do the frequencies change as the Moon spirals out from the Earth, then in, then we have Once in a Blue Ring?
Why should biologists have all the fun? Astronomy for Creationists
As the moon recedes blue moons become rarer, and for an astronomically short time they vanish as there will be exactly 12 lunar cycles per solar year
I haven't calculated when that will be - easy if you linearly extrapolate the recession, but that is wrong, since it is quite non-linear.
At some point the solar year will begin to lengthen as the Sun loses enough mass to matter, this will be fast enough at some point to exceed the lunar recession, and I suspect without calculation that it will overtake the gross lunar recession so we will have blue moons again. Of course the moon might not survive this episode.
The we settle into what will most likely be a long boring quasi-static phase orbiting a cooling white dwarf with very slow secular evolution of orbits.
Well said, Steinn Sigurdsson! It would be nice if that made it into (1) the Farmer's Almanac; and/or (2) Sky & Telescope; and/or NPR.
Visualize the Earth (perhaps with its ocerans having been blasted away) singing:
Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone,
Without a dream in my heart,
Without a love of my own,
Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for...
Lyrics by Lorenz Hart (a relative of mine, on my mother's mother's side, by the way), music by Richard Rodgers: