[Seashore]

Originally Posted by burgundia

I know now why the saying:Once in a blue moon....

I did a google search on this and came up with this article:
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Time for a ‘blue moon’ – or is it?

By Ben Steelman
Ben.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com

Published: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 11:07 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 11:07 a.m.

Once in a blue moon? It happens Thursday night.



A "blue moon" rises above the water tower at Princess Place and 17th street.
StarNews file

Then again, it might not be until Nov. 21, 2010. It all depends on how you define it.

A “blue moon” refers to any full moon that doesn’t fit the usual once-a-month pattern. Since the regular lunar cycle, from full moon to full moon, runs 29.5 days, some months will eventually have two full moons. It doesn’t happen often – once every 2.7154 years, so be precise.

Popular lore of the past 50 years or so uses “blue moon” to describe the second of two full moons in a single calendar month. Since the last full moon fell on Dec. 2, the next – the blue moon – will come on New Year’s Eve.

According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, the nation’s official timekeeper, that’s not entirely accurate, though. A more precise definition – one used by the Maine Farmers’ Almanac for decades – describes a “blue moon” as happening when four full moons fall during one single season of the year, rather than the usual three. To be precise, the “blue moon” is the third of these four full moons, and it can be the only full moon in a month.

By this tighter definition, we won’t have another true blue moon until Nov. 21.

How did we mess this up? Well, in 1946, Sky & Telescope magazine ran an article defining the blue moon as the second full moon in a month, based on a misreading of the Maine Farmers’ Almanac. (That’s a different publication, incidentally, than the Farmers’ Almanac you’ll probably find on your local newsstand.) Sky & Telescope is very picky about accuracy, and in 1999, it ran a long article correcting its mistake.

Why does this matter? Well, you might care if you take planting by the full moon seriously, as many readers of the Maine Farmers’ Almanac did back in the 1800s. Plant when the moon isn’t right, the old belief goes, and your crops will fail. (At least that’s what we believed before we discovered fertilizer and pesticides.)

Or you might care if you’re trying to calculate the correct dates for Easter and Lent by using the phases of the moon. This was a big deal in the Middle Ages.

According to the Farmers’ Almanac – the modern one, not the Maine Farmers’ Almanac – every few years, the full moon would come too early for Lent. At this time, churchmen would declare this early moon to be the “belewe” moon, and tell the faithful to go by the next full moon. “Belewe,” in Old English, means either “blue” or “betrayer”; thus, the early moon was “betraying,” or fooling people.

At least, that’s one story. Very occasionally, a full moon does appear to be blue, usually because of pollutants high in the atmosphere. The most famous occasion came after the Krakatoa volcano erupted in 1883; it blew so much volcanic ash around the world that the moon looked blue for nearly two years afterward.

In common speech, the sense of “blue moon” as a synonym for “never gonna happen” or “hardly ever happens” goes a long way back. According to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, the earliest known usage appeared in print in 1528.

The Otto Preminger movie The Moon is Blue, starring William Holden and David Niven, caused a scandal back in 1953 for using the words “virgin” and “seduce” out loud. It was banned in Boston.

In 1934, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart wrote the popular ballad “Blue Moon,” which was later sung by Louis Armstrong, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and just about everyone else.The most famous version, however, is the 1961 do-wop rendition by the Marcels (“Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone …”)

[End of Article]

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I thought the passages I've marked in red are interesting.