Caoimhín's Content

Today we are going to be looking at the Moon. We are going to start by taking a look at sunset yesterday, so we’re taking a look at the 1st of April or April Fool’s Day, which was the date of the Full Moon this month. It has just happened, last night the Moon was full when it rose for us here in Ireland and of course the Moon will be quite close to full again tonight. The Moon doesn’t change incredibly drastically from one night to the other, although it does still noticeably change.

Just as the Moon rose in Ireland yesterday, it was at 99.9% full and it had that lovely orangey-goldeny glow that we often see when we look at the Moon as the Sun is setting. Initially of course the Moon was very close to the horizon, so you would have to have a pretty clear view of your horizon in order to be able to see it. It was a little bit later when I saw the Moon yesterday, the Moon had to rise a little bit higher to get over the horizon in my location. This did make the sky around it darker and gave an even more fantastic view. It will look very similar today, just a little bit past full, though we may have to move a little bit later in the evening to catch it at the right time. When looking at the Full Moon, I usually talk about a football player on the Moon rather than a Man on the Moon or a Face on the Moon. The football player is made up of some of the dark areas on the west of the Moon, right in the northern hemisphere. The Sea of Serenity is the head of the football player, the body of the football player is the Sea of Tranquility, the two legs of the football player are the Seas of Nectar and Fecundity and the football that makes them a football player is the Sea of Crises. I usually use this shape to point out the Sea of Tranquility.

However, thanks to the angle at moonrise, I think the story of the hare or the rabbit works quite well. Essentially the Sea of Tranquility and Serenity form the face of the hare or the rabbit, what would be the football players legs are now ears, and the whole dark area on the east, the Ocean of Storms or Oceanus Procellarum, that is the body of the rabbit. Then we have of course a little rabbit tail back at the back as the Sea of Moisture. In some of these stories, the Sea of Crises just above the Sea of Tranquility, is meant to be the Moon. In some stories, this is meant to be a hare or a rabbit on the Moon portrayed with the Full Moon above it. It’s an interesting alternative and it works very well when the Moon is just rising for us here in Ireland. As we push later into the night, the angle at which we’re seeing the Moon changes. This puts the rabbit pretty much on its side, and it makes it easier to see the football player. That brings us all the way around, almost, to moonset on the morning of the 2nd of April.

We’re going to move to the Full Moon for April rising, it’s sometimes called the Pink Moon. Moving ahead to moonrise on the 2nd, this will change the phase. The Moon will be rising just a little bit later. We’re not going to see as much of the orangey-yellow glow simply because the Moon is rising later than the sunset. There is also a slight difference along the top or eastern edge, a little bit of shadow, a little bit of extra cratering visible because the Moon is only 99.1% full. It is still 99% full, it is mostly full. However, it’s not 100% full for us here in Ireland and in fact, as we follow the Moon here from sunset on the 1st into sunrise on the 2nd, the Moon isn’t 100% full for us at all, we’re only seeing 99% full from here in Ireland.

This Full Moon is important or special or particular in a couple of ways. This is the first Full Moon that we’re having after the March equinox. If we get rid of our ground and atmosphere then we can follow the Moon back, from full on the 1st of April. If we go back to the 20th, back to the date of the equinox, the Moon was practically new. From the date of the equinox moving forward, this, on the 1st, is the first Full Moon that we’re going to run into. This is the Full Moon that decides the date of Easter in Christian calendars. The first Full Moon, after the date of the equinox, the very next Sunday after that is Easter. Moving forward to the next Sunday after the Full Moon, that brings us to the 5th, and that is the date of Easter this year. On other years, it varies because it’s based on a lunar calendar. You can have a Full Moon the day after the equinox, and the very next Sunday after that will your Easter Sunday. So the Easter Sunday can be as early as almost mid March, close to the 20th of March, or it can be much later, closer to the end of April. We’re getting it kind of in the middle this year because the Full Moon is a few days after the equinox, it’s not very close to the equinox, and it’s not as far as it could be from the equinox, almost 29 days later. This is the Full Moon that decides when Easter is going to fall and it has just happened, so our very next Sunday after this will be Easter. This is sometimes called the Paschal Full Moon, and there is an older post on the website that talks about the Computus and more of the history of the date of easter.

We’ll bring back on our atmosphere and our ground, and we’ll come back to the actual date of the Full Moon, just to double check its color. As I mentioned, to me it looks orangey, goldeny, I might say salmon if I was pushed, but I certainly wouldn’t say pink. This seems odd because this is the Pink Moon. Many Full Moons during the year have nicknames, the Salmon Moon, the Frost Moon, the Worm Moon, and this Moon’s nickname is the Pink Moon, and of course, the Moon doesn’t look pink. The Moon, when it is the Pink Moon, it doesn’t look pink. Then again, the Moon doesn’t look like a worm when it’s the Worm Moon, and it doesn’t look like a salmon when it’s the Salmon Moon. These names aren’t about features of the Moon, they are names related to the time that things happen. The Salmon Moon happens when salmon are running up river, roughly. The Frost Moon happens when you get a frost in winter. The Pink Moon is when you get pinks and pinks are a type of flower. They’re a flower that looks pink, in the same way that oranges look orange and violets look violet, and in the exact same way, we get our word pink from the flower pinks. The same way we get our word orange from the fruit orange and we get our word violet from the flowers violets. We get our word pink from the plant pink.

This is the Pink Moon, named after pinks, or at least pink flowers, since before it even had a strong association with pink, the color. Originally at least, in English, potentially around the same time. The names that we give to the Full Moons come from Native American stories, and those Native American stories are filtered through farmers almanacs into the English language. This was done quite long ago, in the 1800s and 1900s. Of course, the Native American tribes that originally named this Moon after the time of year when ground phlox is in season, they wouldn’t have called those flowers pinks. Pinks are a European flower, while creeping phlox is a pink flower from North America. Those Native Americans didn’t speak English, so they would have used their own native language term, for the plant and the colour. The name is translated, and in the English language, certainly by the 19th century, pink was a color that people recognized and called pink with the word pink. Things would have been a little different when America was first being colonized and these names were first picked up and brought into the English language and back to Europe.

Another very important thing about this particular Full Moon is it’s the Full Moon that Artemis II is heading towards, almost. The Artemis II, or Artemis 2, mission is a mission to the Moon, and it was launched on the 1st of April, essentially launched at the April 1st Full Moon. However the Artemis II mission is going to orbit the Earth, twice, then travel through space for about four days before it finally reaches the Moon. I would normally say lunar orbit, but the Artemis II mission is not orbiting the Moon. We have gone to the Moon before, and in this particular instance, we are going to the Moon, but we’re not landing on it and we’re also not orbiting it. With the first missions that orbited the Moon, Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 for example, these missions orbited the Earth, left Earth’s gravity, went to the Moon, orbited it, and in orbiting it they were trapped by the Moon gravity. They then had to burn fuel, they had to use their engines, to break free of the Moon’s gravity and make it home again. That is not what Artemis II is doing. Artemis II is going to orbit the Earth, about twice, so it is still in Earth orbit now, even though it launched yesterday from the date of posting. The Artemis II mission is going to orbit the Earth, then it is going to break free of Earth’s gravity and it is going to go to the Moon. The Moon’s gravity will influence it, cause it to swing around, and the Artemis II mission will have enough velocity after that maneuver to travel straight back towards the Earth, no extra fuel needed.

This is called a free-return trajectory and it is something we’ve done once before, in an emergency, with Apollo 13. The Apollo 13 mission was intended to land on the Moon, get caught by its gravity, but on the way to the Moon, quite close to the Moon, a little closer to the Moon than it was to the Earth, there was an issue. An important component broke, and so the astronauts could not safely land on the Moon. Rather than slowing down and getting caught in lunar gravity, they made a course correction and allowed the Moon’s gravity to slingshot them back to the Earth without them having to burn any more fuel, which is cheaper. If we can pull this off, if we can deliberately get the Artemis II mission to go to the Moon, slingshot around it, and come back again without wasting the extra fuel to escape from the Moon’s gravity, that makes it cheaper, and that’s one of the things that the Artemis II mission is doing. It is not only sending people back towards the Moon, around the Moon but not actually on the Moon, not for Artemis II. Not only are we finally sending people back to the Moon, we are testing out going to the Moon in this different way, which should be more efficient, which should be better for future missions to the Moon. If Artemis II is successful, there will be Artemis III, which is intended to land on the Moon, and of course, we’re all very hopeful that Artemis II will be successful.

That is a little bit about our Full Moon yesterday, color, and the Artemis II mission. I hope that you get a chance to see the still 99% Full Moon that is coming up in just a few hours time, I hope you get a chance to see that. If you do, I hope you notice the Sea of Tranquility, whether you see a Rabbit on the Moon or a Man on the Moon, or a Face on the Moon. The Artemis II mission is launched, so you can check out its progress through the NASA website and I believe some other websites are tracking its progress as well. Most importantly, I hope that you enjoyed this piece. If you did, please do like it and if you like this kind of content, then please subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. Thank you very much for reading and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.