You live in the country. Or at least spend a lot of time here. So the night sky isn’t just a blank amber slate. (Average number of stars visible from Manhattan: 11. From Woodstock: 2,600.) But there’s much more: We get six meteors an hour every moonless night after midnight, aurora patterns once a decade or two, and pop-out dazzlers annually, whenever any of the three brightest planets come nearest to us. (This year it’ll mainly happen in the fall).
So it ought to be no chore to supplement all the wonderful art-like sky-happenings with a bit of personal knowledge to increase our enjoyment. It’s like getting a free accompanying booklet when we open our astro-package. Accurate information constitutes a big change, since for thousands of years superstition and astrology heavily prejudiced our grasp of the universe. The assumed influence of the heavens explains why “disaster” literally means “bad star,” and why we call someone ‘mercurial’ if they’re quick to change, reflecting that planet’s speedy motion, and have terms like martial arts that clearly derived from the Martian reddish tint and an association between that small planet with blood and fire. Old beliefs persist in other areas too: since foul night vapors were long thought to be the chief cause of disease, it should be no surprise that ailments can have names like mal-aria (“bad air”).
Since common nocturnal objects and events often come wrapped in beguiling mixtures of truth and silliness, let’s occasionally explore one so we can enjoy separating the fascinating from the make-believe. Take the Full Moon, which will be extraordinary this month since, for the first time this century, it happens smack dab on the summer solstice. Deep consequences of that will begin next Thursday when the Moon commences its phase cycle as a New Moon, letting us watch the progression of its entire lunation by witnessing its phase cycle from the beginning.
The easiest version of nocturnal “wrong vs right” indeed starts with the Moon. Watching the sky, it immediately looks as if everything is circling around our world. The Sun rises, crosses the firmament, and repeats the circuit the next day. The stars all appear to orbit around us. No wonder the Bible and all other ancient literary works incorrectly stated that Earth is the stationary center of the universe. That’s truly how it looks.
It took my first hero, Aristarchus on the Greek island of Samos in 400 BC, to state the obvious: We’d see stuff circling around us if they were really doing that. But we’d see the same thing if, instead, our world was spinning. He decided the latter was more likely. Despite Aristarchus being spot-on correct and celebrated for that insight for centuries afterward, his name is nowadays unknown by your friends. And when it came time to award fame to somebody for being the first to say that Earth spins while orbiting around the Sun, historians bewilderingly gave that honor to someone who’d repeated Aristarchus’ words 1,800 years later. Copernicus was the guy they taught us about at school, right? I guess a Greek living in ancient Egypt was just not as Jeopardy!-worthy as a Renaissance character who was a modern Western European.
But the truth was even weirder. Turned out, despite all that correct spinning business, there really was a celestial body that circled around us anyway. But just a single one. That’s of course the Moon. You’d think its motion would be easy to observe. Alas, since Earth turns rapidly (1,038 mph at the equator) but the Moon is relatively distant and thus slow-seeming, the Moon’s visual nightly motion is almost entirely caused by ourselves rotating after all. Wheels within wheels. And I’ll bet you’ve never even thought about all this, but it doesn’t matter because I’m just two minutes from reaching the really cool stuff.
When you romantically see the Moon sinking into the west preparing to set, that’s because Earth’s rotation is making the western horizon rise up. But to witness the Moon’s own separate motion, we can easily arrange that. Choose any night when it floats next to a star. In a single hour, it’ll have moved enough to now stand one Moon-width to the left of that star. The next night at the same time, it’ll hover 26 Moon-widths to the left of where it was the night before. That’s the Moon’s actual orbital motion around us.
Enough Moon motion. Let’s jump to moonlight. It’s the greatest nighttime illumination whenever you’re away from artificial lights. But the half Moon, which happens in just a week, on Friday, June 14, offers only skimpy light. That’s because the Moon’s dark powdery surface is a terrible reflector that bounces away just 12% of the sunlight hitting it. The Moon’s inferior reflectiveness makes it match the brightness of your asphalt driveway. But the low sunlight angle hitting the Moon next Friday creates shadowing that makes that the very best time to dramatically see craters and other lunar features through any telescope. So next Friday is the best day this month for Moon observing using any optical equipment. If it’s cloudy, no worries: the next night, with the moon now officially in its waxing gibbous phase, it will look just as good.
Then a week later when the Moon is full, on June 21, you’d think it would double the half-Moon’s brilliance. But it’s not even close. The Full Moon is ten times brighter than the Half Moon. But that’s just the first of several major things to know about the Full Moon.
1. Since the circle was regarded as the universe’s perfect shape, and the Full Moon is one of nature’s few items that’s a true visual sphere (it’s out-of-round by just one part in 500) it comes psychologically equipped with a magical “vibe” or “energy” that’s made it revered to cultures around the world for countless centuries,
2. Only during its Full phase is the Moon visible all night long.
3. The Full Moon is opposite the Sun in all respects. It rises just as the Sun is setting. It sets when the Sun rises. At midnight when the sun is lowest down, the full Moon is highest-up. Since the 2024 June full Moon happens on the solstice day of the 21st, the very day the Sun is absolutely at its highest of the year, it means this month’s full Moon on the 21st is the very lowest full Moon in years. Just look at it! Since we’re in Daylight Time, the middle of the night is now 1 a.m., so check out the full Moon then, when it’s at its highest of the night. It’s barely up at all! From places like Fairbanks, Alaska, this Full Moon won’t even clear their horizon. It won’t rise, period. For them, June simply has no full Moon.
4. There’s also lots of wrong stuff. Myths include the idea that births increase at Full Moon. Extensive hospital studies in NYC in the late ‘50’s showed no link at all between lunar phases and birth numbers. Other statistical analyses revealed no connection between Full Moon and crime, school absences, or calls to crisis centers. But something else popped up. Turns out, since the human estrus cycle of 29 ½ days exactly coincides with the Moon’s full-to-full phase periodicity, the brightness of Full Moon nights may have encouraged nocturnal travel (like visiting someone’s cave, say) that happened less often during dark nights when sharper-eyed predators made such dating dangerous. So a fertility link developing over time makes perfect sense if based on brightness rather than gravity or anything else.
And in any case, doesn’t viewing this first solstitial Full Moon in 38 years make it seem sufficiently worthwhile for us to now visit the cave of that special someone?
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