The Sun & The Moon Doing Strange Things

[Ronnie Jersey]

I managed to get one of her photos sent to me, showing the weird blue that the moon showed up: (I thought this was a fortean site, where odd occurrences are posted, and a 'super blue moon' is certainly odd!)

 

[Xanatic*]

Wouldn't the blueishness of that street lamp indicate everything else was reddish?

 

[eburacum]

I can't see the moon in that picture, to be honest.

 

[eburacum]

I actually did see a literal blue moon in 1992, and I've described it here before, but that last description was also quite a while ago. There was a lunar eclipse during the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1992, and this caused the colour of the moon to become deep blue. Here's a picture of it compared to a normal lunar eclipse:

Apparently there is a special scale, called the Danjon scale, which ranks the darkness and colour of lunar eclipses. This one in 1992 scored L0, which is about as dark as they get. The reason was all the dust in the upper atmosphere from the eruption, which wasn't really visible to people on the Earth, but if you had been standing on the Moon at the time you would have seen the light from the Sun refracted through the Earth's atmosphere, and on this occasion also dimmed by the dust to a peculiar blueish-purple tinge.

To me it looked like the colour of a gas ring burning in an otherwise dark kitchen.

 

[Sid]

According to "Sky at Night" magazine a blue moon originally meant "the third full moon in an astronomical season of four" but a misrepresentation that appeared in print in 1946 defined it as the "second full moon in a month" being easier to understand the latter stuck.

At this time of year it is (for us in GB) low in the sky so is more likely to be affected by atmospheric conditions. This would normally result in it looking more orange or red but I'd guess it depends what local cack you have in the atmosphere near you.

I was more impressed with the circle of hot orange & red that was cast through the thin clouds that were passing in front of the Moon myself!

 

[MorningAngel]

This probably isn’t strange, probably something perfectly normal. But there’s a very bright ‘star’ underneath the moon. It was really there, that’s why I took the picture. Sorry it’s at an odd angle I was trying to take the picture without the threat of dropping my phone out of the window

 

[Erinaceus]

This probably isn’t strange, probably something perfectly normal. But there’s a very bright ‘star’ underneath the moon. It was really there, that’s why I took the picture. Sorry it’s at an odd angle I was trying to take the picture without the threat of dropping my phone out of the window View attachment 70151

It's Jupiter. I had intended taking a picture but it was too cloudy here.