The full moon has inspired everything from religious holidays to outlandish doomsday conspiracy theories and horror films.
In recent years, you’ve also likely become more aware of the various moon names and phenomena, such as the “super moon” or “blood moon.”
Each lunar cycle is just over 29.5 days long, meaning that every month the full moon falls on a slightly different date – here’s the full lunar calendar for 2023.
When are the full moons in 2023?
The full calendar of full moons for 2023 and when they peak in the UK are below, according to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich:
- January 6 (23:07)
- February 5 (18:28)
- March 7 (12:40)
- April 6 (5:34)
- May 5 (18:34)
- June 4 (04:41)
- July 3 (12:38)
- August 1 (19:31)
- August 31 (02:35)
- September 29 (10:57)
- October 28 (21:24)
- November 27 (09:16)
- December 27 (00:33)
The first full moon of the year falls on Friday 6 January and peaks at 11:07 pm in the UK.
What are the different types of lunar phenomena?
You may have come across some of the terms that refer to particularly noteworthy full moons. Here are definitions for some of the more common phenomena:
Supermoon: The Moon moves further and further away from the Earth at various points in its elliptical orbit. When a full or new moon coincides with the point closest to the planet, it is called a “supermoon” because the proximity makes the moon appear larger and brighter in the sky.
Blue Moon: The time required for a complete cycle of 12 moons is about 11 days shorter than the time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun. This means that there are sometimes two moons (13 in a year) in a calendar month, a phenomenon known as a blue moon. Interestingly, this is not the traditional definition of the term, which means the third full moon in the astronomical season (as opposed to our calendar months) with four full moons.
blood moon:
A “blood moon” occurs during a total lunar eclipse when it turns reddish due to the diffraction of sunlight in the Earth’s atmosphere. A solar eclipse occurs when the Earth is between the Moon and the Sun and the shadow of the planet covers the Moon. Short wavelengths like blue and purple bounce off the Earth, while longer wavelengths like red and orange travel through it, causing the Moon to glow with those colors.
Where do moon names come from?
Most pre-modern calendars used the moon as the basis for the names of the months, and this convention ended with the introduction of the Julian and Gregorian solar calendars.
In modern times, new names for full moons and their supposed meanings have made their way into popular culture commonly attributed to Native American tribes.
Giving each full moon a distinctive name was an important way to keep track of the seasons and essentially divide the year into months.
The American magazine Farmer’s Almanac, apparently referred to as the gold standard for modern lunar names, first published its list of lunar names in the 1930s:
- January: Wolf Moon
- February: snow moon
- March: Half moon
- April: pink moon
- May: flower moon
- June: Strawberry Moon
- July: Buck Moon
- August: sturgeon moon
- September: Harvest Moon
- October: Hunter’s Moon
- November: beaver moon
- December: cold moon
According to Laura Redish, director and co-founder of Native Languages of the Americas, there is no standardized Native American calendar, although NASA claims that these names originated from the Algonquian tribe, which is part of a larger cultural language group called the Algonquian. .
According to a list published by the Council of Tribes of the Algonquian Nation in 2005, some of the common names, such as “strawberry moon” and “harvest moon”, appear to be Algonquian. Others don’t.
According to Ms. Redish, different tribes used different calendars, and a number of calendars appear to have been searched for commonly used names, and some of the popular nicknames are essentially inventions.
Source: I News
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