Talk:Blue moon

message: The information from Full moon#The Blue Moon should probably merged into this article. 
BlankVerse ∅ 16:26, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: A note

message: The term "Once in a Blue Moon" has nothing to do with the cyclical appearance of a celestial body that we call the moon. It is actually associated with an early Dutch trading ship known as the "Blue Moon." The Blue Moon was a world travelling trader and had a planned route to follow as it traversed the world's oceans. The Dutch captain at the helm had to make decisions as to where they went based on directions from home to sell or to buy certain items in specific ports. What made their appearance so rare in some ports was the captains discretion to buy more of some goods because it was a good price. His holds were full and he now had to interrupt his planned or promised route to resell his new found purchases. When he finally got back to the original schedule of his trade route --- IT WAS ONCE IN A BLUE MOON --- Hence that is where the term originated - not because of an imagined ethnic variety of our "man in the moon."  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jimcorbett (talk • contribs) 18:04, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I put this item under a header below the administrative headings.  Is there a source for this story?! -- Tom Peters (talk) 15:03, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

text: I have done research on this. I have looked through every publication I could find available to the public. I can find no reference to a Dutch ship named 'The Blue Moon', whether that ship be a trader, schooner, sailing ship or any other ship known as, manufactured, flagged or owned under a Dutch registry. Further research in archaic foreign flag archives would be necessary. The only ships with the name Blue Moon that I found were the Tennessee River Blue Moon Cruises, the former Pallmantur Cruises MS Blue Moon, currently registered as Azamara Cruises MS Azamara Quest. MR2David (talk) 07:45, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Someone has a sense of humor! Zaslav (talk) 05:37, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  blue ship? 

message: maybe once in a blue moon someone will look at this talk page.
I have once read that a "blue moon" refer to a full moon that also occur when the moon is in apogee (the furthest away from earth) this is a combination that only occur about every 50 ? years. Could not find any refrence to it anywhere.
can anyone help ?
As far as I remember there was such a "blue moon" few years ago. The moon was 15% smaller (as seen from earth)
Does this ring a bell to anyone or "what was I smoking?" is the better question to ask ? Zeq 20:33, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've never heard of that use of the term "blue moon". --Carnildo 18:57, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Apogee and full moon ? 

message: Shouldn't it be Blue Moon ? -- 141.30.212.78 20:25, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Is it wrongly capitalised?  It could be, if this may refer to an occurrence when the Moon is blue.  However, (1) the Moon itself is not blue even during the atmospheric event; and (2) an appearance of the Moon (the Earth's only moon), is conventionally written as "a moon", hence the related article title full moon.  See MOS:CELESTIALBODIES.  The lemma is supposed to represent common usage, as in  and  which have "blue moon", so I think Blue moon as at present is preferred. --Cedderstk 12:26, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why the wrong lemma ? 

message: I can not understand at all what the rationale is for the section "Calendar vs. Farmers' Almanac: 2004 – 2010". Could someone please explain this to me? Lunokhod 22:00, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is the purpose of the section "Calendar vs. Farmers' Almanac: 2004 – 2010"? 

message: Does anyone have a picture of a blue moon? Quietmartialartist 00:42, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Pictures?

message: Last I checked the moon took about 28 days to make a full cycle. That would make 13 full moons per year. I have also heard the wide told tale that a blue moon was the second full moon of a Gregorian Calendar month, but it occurs 1-2 times per year, not once every couple of years.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.106.3.58 (talk) 20:47, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, it takes about 27.5 days. Yes, the Blue Moon is the second full moon in a month. If I can just get my science fair display board back, I can see how many full moons there are in a year, although I'm pretty sure that's correct.Chimchar monferno (talk) 08:29, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: For anyone reading this - note that it takes 27.5 days to get back to the same spot, but in that time the earth has gone 1/12 of the way around the sun, so it takes a little longer before you would actually see the sun on the moon at the same angle... which is where 29/30 days comes in. Greg (talk) 08:02, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

text: Random lists of trivia have no proper place in an encyclopedia. If you feel that references to blue moons in these media are worth discussing in this article, then add a paragraph or two discussing them, but make sure that what you write really is a discussion in real English prose, not a merely a listing of those references. Also make sure your assertions are well-sourced. TheScotch (talk) 06:45, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lunar Cycle Time 

message: I resolved some confusion that had accumulated in the introduction. Someone had apparently divided the average period between two blue moons by 365 days (instead of 365 + x) and anonymously added the resulting number of years with lots and lots of digits but no reference; then someone else had taken this value at face value and anonymously added the "fact" that if you use the frequency that Google returns if you search for "once in a blue moon" you get a different number of years (also specified with lots and lots of digits). I removed all this and simply stated that the blue moon occurs about once every 2.7154 years --  these are the digits up to which  the frequency provided by Google (1.16699016 × 10^{-8} Hz) and the result of the calculation synodic month / (vernal equinox year - 12 * synodic month) match. (The synodic month is the period of the moon's phases, and the vernal equinox year is the year that the major calendars try to track.) If you add any digits beyond this, please provide a source. Joriki (talk) 19:22, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Very good idea! We're trying to help people understand not confuse them more, right?  Greg (talk) 07:48, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  So I removed the confusing decimal fraction and replaced it with what really matters, i.e. that this happens 7 times in 19 years (19/7 = 2.714285......) -- Tom Peters (talk) 15:09, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  confusion in the introduction 

message: This article needs a photograph --Melly42 (talk) 23:59, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photos 

message: I'd like to see a reference for this if it to be included.  If no reference is provided, I'd like to delete it. Gandydancer (talk) 17:32, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I second that.  I think it is a fantasy. Tom Peters (talk) 18:19, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: You are being more generous than I when you ask for a ref (referring to the two article citations you added). I know a fair amount about myths and this sounds like some teenage fantasy.  How about getting rid of it till it's referenced?  It's just plain dopey and makes the article look bad.Gandydancer (talk) 18:33, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: No reference yet.  Removed till a reference is furnished. Gandydancer (talk) 17:03, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Section put back without reference or comment.  Removed again. Gandydancer (talk) 15:47, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Night of love section 

message: Does the blue moon have anything to do with the expression out of the blue? Just wondering... :) – Alensha talk 20:22, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: question

message: Blue Moon's are assaociated with bad luck also aren't they?
Like the phrase "Born under a Blue Moon", implying that the person/thing is cursed with Bad luck or something.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by UFOash (talk • contribs) 19:33, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Plurals are not formed with apostrophes. The Real Walrus (talk) 20:10, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Luck 

message: I've always been taught that a blue moon is the second full moon in a single month. AmericanLeMans (talk) 02:22, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: This is also used in http://oeis.org/A125680 and http://www.obliquity.com/cgi-bin/bluemoon.cgi and menioned in an earlier comment above. — MFH:Talk 21:07, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  In the July 1943 issue of "Sky & Telescope magazine columnist Lawrence J. Lafleur made reference to the term "Blue Moon." Being that there are 13 full moons during a calendar year, there will be 4 full moons during one of the 4 quarters. In generic terms, using summer for example, the full moons are called the "Early Summer Moon"; "Midsummer Moon"; and "Late Summer Moon". According to the 1937 edition of the defunct Maine Farmer's Almanac when the 4th full moon occurs during that season the Blue Moon is the third full moon. The second full moon would remain the mid season moon, and the 4th would remain the late season moon. In 1980 Deborah Byrd of Earth & Sky stated, in error, that the Blue Moon was the second full moon during a solar calendar month. She neglected to explain that she was describing one specific occurrence of one full moon during one specific month. The rule Ms. Byrd used was from the 1937 almanac, but in that one month, in that one season, in that one year the Blue Moon did fall at the end of that particular month. Her brief explanation gave the impression of a new rule, which it was not. Because of the lack of correction and current popularity, both rules can be used accurately. MR2David (talk) 08:06, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Two full moons in one month

message: Not that it should be added to the article, but this Wikipedia article (and a photo "blue moon.jpg") feature fairly prominently in the new The Smurfs movie. Bookcats (talk) 01:45, 30 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Smurfs

message: It could also be that the notion of a blue moon is related
to the Purkinje effect. The effect is described as:
"Peak luminance sensitivity of the human eye to 
shift toward the *blue* end of the color spectrum 
at low illumination levels."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_effect
Film production sometimes uses dark blue filters to simulate
night filming. The result looks natural because of the 
Purkinje effect I guess.
Janburse (talk) 17:18, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Purkinje Effect 

message: The French version of this article claims that there is another phenomenon called "Blue Moon" in which the moon actually becomes blue during an eclipse under extremely rare circumstances (the Earth being extremely cold would send back blue light to the moon instead of the more common infrared that turn the moon to red). It also claims that Confucius mentions one such moon as "icy looking". Does anyone know about this? I couldn't find any other information on the web about it, and it is also not mentioned in other languages on Wikipedia (at least not in the German, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Portugese ones). It would be interesting to get more information from a real historian/scientist on this point.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.9.13.133 (talk) 13:12, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually a bluish edge of the umbra during a total lunar eclipse is rather common. It is caused by absorption of red light by Earth's ozone layer for some of the light rays that pass through the Earth's atmosphere on the way to the moon.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.6.130.136 (talk) 23:27, 24 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Real" blue moon eclipse 

message: It's important to note that there is more than one farmers almanac and we shouldn't confuse them.  The one that started the confusion in the 40's with a Sky and Telescope writer is the "Maine Farmers Almanac".  That should not be confused with either the "Farmers Almanac" or the "Old Farmers Almanac" which are different publications.--RadioFan (talk) 22:16, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I have corrected references to the Farmers' Almanac to Maine Farmers' Almanac (further to your own edit).  In fact, I had begun making the changes before seeing your post here.  It's amusing that two people should notice this confusion almost simultaneously (though, of course, it's no surprise that the article should be getting an unusual amount of attention on this date).  The article must have been in this confused state for some time, despite the cited Farmers' Almanac article pointing out that the Maine Farmers' Almanac is "(no relation to this Farmers' Almanac, published in Lewiston, Maine)". Butsuri (talk) 23:55, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  farmers almanac 

message: Sorry re my recent knee jerk delete in the lead.  So many times people have tried to edit the seasonal blue moon out that I have grown careless and just assume they are wrong.  The edit was an improvement. Sorry...  Gandydancer (talk) 13:36, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  my recent delete... 

message: "According to Google Calculator, "once in a blue moon" is equal to 1.16699016 × 10-8 hertz."
* This value is wrong by more than 10 percent!
** Duration of a synodic period of the moon in days: T = 29.53058912
** We have 4 months with 30 days and 7 months with 31 days. Other months are shorter than T.
** Probability of a Blue Moon within a year: H = 4*(30/T - 1) + 7*(31/T - 1) = 0.411895599
** Average Distance between Blue Moons: Y = 1/H = 2.427799675 years (as frequency: 1.305246263 × 10-8 hertz)
** This value is identically for the Gregorian calendar as for the Julian calendar (and for all calendars with four 30-days months, seven 31-days months and months which are always shorter than T).
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.171.11.242 (talk • contribs) 10:46, 8 February 2014 UTC
:WP:OR. EvergreenFir (talk) 04:14, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: See the explanation #confusion in the introduction which is also a synthesis - a good reference about frequency or explanation about how Google derived its figure would help.  If the Metonic cycle were perfect, then it looks like 7 occurrences in 19 years which is within 0.05% of Google in a Julian calendar. --Cedderstk 12:49, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Incorrect value

message: Can someone tell me why it called a blue moon? Liana05omg (talk) 02:37, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Have a look at the "Origin of the term" section in the article. —Bruce1eetalk 04:51, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  blue moon 

message: I find it interesting that the church calculates a rather complex array of months where they need to insert an extra month (moon month) to make everything else fit. I am deleting my earlier text asking where it all fit with blue moons.
"The extra months commenced on 3 December (year 2), 2 September (year 5), 6 March (year 8), 4 December (year 10), 2 November (year 13), 2 August (year 16), and 5 March (year 19)" (from the Computus entry).
All their observations which came to the 19 year formula and placing of moons had to originally come from observances of moon timings and winter/summer solstices, approximated into the computus.
Now to work out what the church called their extra moons Greg (talk) 05:36, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Church Dates of Seasonal Blue Moons 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: How can a blue moon be on the first of the month ever?</br>  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 157.248.100.53 (talk) 22:35, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dates in 2018

message: There have been at least two rather unsatisfactory discussions above on this topic (here and here), going back at least as far as 2008. Until I amended it just now, our article  had a relatively lengthy but deeply misleading paragraph on the subject, seemingly backed by 3 reliable sources. In fact two of these sources (here and here) seemingly made no mention of Blue Moon, let alone Betrayer Moon, and the third (here) simply repeated a speculation without mentioning that its originator had already admitted it was completely wrong. Our article then added much that was not in that source, as well as another  related deeply implausible unsourced speculation later in the section (Old English disappeared in the 12th century, so there is no reason to think it likely that anti-clerical writers around 1528 knew anything about Old English words, still less that they would expect their readers to know such words). I have tried to fix all this as best I can, tho others may well do a better job than I have. I have also considered removing all mention of the speculation, but that would leave a fiction partly created by us circulating out there uncorrected, without any real attempt by us to undo the harm that we had done by presenting the correct facts to the readers whom we had previously helped to mislead. (Indeed a part of me would like to say in the article that Wikipedia had contributed to the problem, but in the past I've found that such admissions tend to get at least one such admission eventually got removed for various reasons, possibly rightly so). Tlhslobus (talk) 11:06, 28 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Betrayer moon'  

message: This article is very biased towards American usage.  I expect my edits to be reverted by Americans, but the contents of the article constitute the third definition in the OED Third Edition updated March 2013.  Can we not have a less biased article that gives equal weight to the OED's definition 1: "A moon (real, depicted, or imagined) that appears blue. On rare occasions the moon can appear distinctly blue owing to the presence of smoke or dust particles in the atmosphere"?  Dbfirs 07:49, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I reverted you but it has nothing to do with being an American.  A few years back I researched this issue extensively and as best as I can understand it is correct as it reads.  Can you offer RS to back up your assertions?  Gandydancer (talk) 16:08, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Only the Oxford English Dictionary.  The article presents a very American viewpoint, but since most on-line references are recent American sources, it is difficult to present a counter-argument.  I'll do some research myself.  I'm pleased to see that the false "betrayer" folk etymology has been debunked.  Dbfirs 17:43, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The best explanation that I have found so far of how the meaning developed in America is on pages 118 to 120 of How the Ray Gun Got Its Zap: Odd Excursions Into Optics by Stephen R Wilk here on Google Books.  Dbfirs 18:15, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Physical blue moon. 

message: Under books there is a citation required for the statement "Note that if two full moons fall within the same astrological sign they will fall in different calendar months, and vice versa." Is there a need to find a source that states the astrological signs change about the 21st of each month and the lunar cycle is ~28 days? The offset between the calendar month and the astrological cycle can never include 2 full moons.
Brian (Shadowfoot) (talk) 11:25, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation required? 

message: Putting this link here for later. The article needs to have the uncited speculation stripped out and some actual references put in. It seems at the very least that evidence of the proverb usage predates the evidence of the calendar usage...
So three sections:
Proverb
Astronomy 
Calendar
https://wordhistories.net/2017/06/21/once-in-a-blue-moon-origin/
Jmackaerospace (talk) 02:31, 3 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Actual Usage Quotes and tidy up 

message: I removed the Popular culture section because none of the topics mentioned had anything to do with the scientific term blue moon. I was reverted saying I needed to allow time for improvements.  It was tagged over a year ago--that seems to be enough time for needed work to be done.  For example in the song "Blue Moon of Kentucky" with Monroe singing, "Blue moon of Kentucky keep on shinning, shine on the one whose gone and left me blue"--what does that have to do with the scientific term?  Sectionworker (talk) 16:42, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I've waited for over a week and nobody has improved the article or even replied with information  on why the section should be kept.  I will again remove it.  Sectionworker (talk) 04:00, 29 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section removed 

message: The English use of"in a Blue Moon", seems to date from no later than 1821, Real Life in London by Pierce Egan. 
See https://www.theidioms.com/once-in-a-blue-moon/ cited in this article.
So is unlikely to have anything to do with a provincial journal, first published in 1819. 86.161.210.123 (talk) 00:07, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  This page needs a lot of work for a real lexicographer 

message: The OED has an extensive entry for "blue moon", and I've added this at the start of the article. A lot of what follows in the article is now repetitive and redundant, in some cases inaccurate, and needs to be shortened or removed. Cheeselymoon (talk) 14:01, 3 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I've done a lot of re-ordering of material and removal of repetition, but the "Calendrical use" section still has a lot of redundancy and could do with tidying up. Cheeselymoon (talk) 16:19, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I've put new material in the "Calendrical use" section. The "Calculation" sub-section needs attention. There needs to be clarity about which rule is being referred to in any calculation, i.e. Maine 1937, Maine using different (e.g. astronomical) seasonal boundaries, Pruett or "other". Cheeselymoon (talk) 21:47, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oxford English Dictionary