Micromoon comes with many names
With all this muggy weather, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear if some of you have been up all night.
Well, you’ll be in good company Friday night – the moon will also be in the sky all night. It’s the only night of the month when it is! The rest of the month, the moon spends at least some time in the daytime sky.
Friday’s full moon is special: it’s a micromoon. A micromoon occurs when the full moon is at the point in its orbit farthest from Earth – also known as apogee. Because a micromoon is farther away, it looks about 14 per cent smaller than a supermoon and appears duller – by about 30 per cent.
Aside from being called a micromoon, the July full moon has a few interesting names: the Full Hay Moon, Buck Moon or Thunder Moon.
Historically, full moons got their names from observation, and being a farmer’s daughter, I can tell you that the Full Hay Moon is aptly named! July is an awfully busy – not to mention warm – time in the hay fields. Away from the open fields and in the woods, this is also the time of year, in North America when buck deer start growing antlers. That’s where the Full Buck
Moon comes from. Finally, the thunder moon: a tribute from the Algonquin to a time of year when spectacular storms light up the skies.
Those are the most common North American names for the July full moon. I recently came across another, less familiar name, at least locally: the Moon of the Hungry Ghosts. The Chinese deserve credit for this ominous name; the moon coincided with the Hungry Ghost Festival, a time when the living honour the dead by leaving food and drink out for their ancestors.
Finally, I thought you might want to raise a glass to this moon moniker: the Mead Moon. In medieval England, when summer crops were nearing harvest, the farmers went out to celebrate with their favourite drink – mead. It was a fermented mixture of honey, malt, yeast and water.
Today farmers might call it The Beer Moon.