The media strikes again.
Who doesn’t love the moon? You just have to look up when the skies are clear and there it is, our lunar friend, doing its thing, changing phases, yanking at our oceans, inspiring the world to look “up.”
It’s little wonder, then, that humanity has created many different names for our planet’s tidal partner in crime. There are useful astronomical names that describe its different phases (new/full, first/third quarter, waxing/waning crescent/gibbous), but there’s also other names that have popped up throughout human history that relate to other subtleties in the lunar dance around our world. A quasi-rare second full moon of the month? Blue moon! When the full moon coincides with perigee (lunar close approach with Earth)? Supermoon! When you get a bonus lunar combo that includes a full moon, a supermoon… and the Earth is blocking the sun so we have a lunar eclipse… and it all happens to occur in January?? That’s a SUPER BLOOD WOLF MOON ECLIPSE! Because of course it is.
As you may or may not have realized, humans—particularly humans in marketing departments, the media, and astrologers with too much time on their hands—like to label things. Some of these labels can be useful, others not so much. Many are, frankly, just plain silly. Which brings me to today’s lunar branding non-event: The Black Moon. Ohh sounds… eerie.
Over to Joe Rao at SPACE.com:
As one who has been involved in the broadcasting field for nearly 40 years, I’d like to point out that we live in a time when the news media is seemingly obsessed with “branding.” This marketing strategy involves creating a differentiated name and image — often using a tagline — in order to establish a presence in people’s mind. In recent years in the field of astronomy, for example, we’ve seen annular eclipses — those cases when the moon is too small to completely cover the disk of the sun — become branded as “Ring of Fire” eclipses. A total eclipse of the moon — when the moon’s plunge through the Earth’s shadow causes the satellite to turn a coppery red color — is now referred to as a “Blood Moon.”
Joe Rao, “Black Moon 2019: What It Is (and Why You Can’t See It)“, SPACE.com
When a full moon is also passing through that part of its orbit that brings it closest to Earth — perigee — we now brand that circumstance as a supermoon. That term was actually conjured up by an astrologer back in 1979 but quite suddenly became a very popular media brand after an exceptionally close approach of a full moon to Earth in March 2011. It surprises me that even NASA now endorses the term, although it seems to me the astronomical community in general shies away from designating any perigee full moon as “super.”
Then there is Blue Moon. This moniker came about because a writer for Sky & Telescope Magazine misinterpreted an arcane definition given by a now-defunct New England Almanac for when a full moon is branded “blue,” and instead incorrectly reasoned that in a month with two full moons, the second is called a Blue Moon. That was a brand that quietly went unnoticed for some 40 years, until a syndicated radio show promoted the term in the 1980s and it then went viral. So now, even though the second full moon in a month is not the original definition for a Blue Moon, in popular culture we now automatically associate the second full moon in a calendar month with a Blue Moon.
So are you ready for yet another lunar brand? The newest one is Black Moon.
That’s a very polite way of saying, “it’s all bullshit, really.”
So, what IS a Black Moon? Well, it’s the opposite of a Blue Moon, as in it’s the second New Moon in the month of July and a New Moon is when the sun, moon and Earth are in almost exact alignment; the entire Earth-facing side of the moon is in complete shadow. The upshot is you can’t see it. It’s a naked-eye astronomical non-event.
Having said that, should the moon exactly line up with the sun, you get a solar eclipse—arguably the most mind-blowing astronomical event we can see on Earth. A plain ol’ Black Moon? Not so much.
UPDATE: As this post turned into the seed for a fun little online discussion, I added some thoughts in the following Twitter thread. Feel free to @ me:
astroengine.com 