Full Moons in 2016

Long time readers of R2N will know that in 2015 the full moons beautifully aligned with the ends of months. This will not be as true in 2016 but after a year of moon watching (https://roadtonowhere.forumotion.org/t50-full-moons-in-2015), I find myself still dedicated to observing and enjoying the years' full moons - like the one we have enjoyed over the last few days.

One of the major lessons I learnt last year was that the March full moon was the most powerful full moon of the year. The combination of spring air and full moons is a natural psychedelic.  It is no accident that date of Christian 'Easter' rituals are tied to the date of that specific full moon. This year the Full Moon in March is the 23rd and Easter follows 4 days later. So this a heads-up - get ready for next month's full moon.

Here is the year's list where you can slow see the full moon move backwards toward the middle of the month

Date Name
Jan. 23 Wendigo Moon
Feb. 22 Crystalline Moon
Mar. 23 Easter Moon
Apr. 22 Budding Moon
May 21 Whippoorwill Moon
June 20 Green Moon
July 19 Oven Moon / Thunder Moon
Aug. 18 Mild Moon
Sept. 16 Misty Mushroom Moon
Oct. 16 Orion/Hunter's Moon
Nov. 14 Frost Moon
Dec. 13 Winter Moon
Jan. 12 Wendigo Moon [2017]

The February moon was beautifully modest and it provided balance to Orion who stole the show with its slow march to the East culminating in a horizon where thin clouds appeared to stand straight up like tongues of flames. The full moon rising in the East, aged Orion displaced to the West, strange clouds over the horizon and a dark winter night evening enclosing it all.

March Moon: The melting snow moistens the sky and the atmosphere give the moon a wet glow. During winter the moon is an alien presence, it glows too white, cold and remote, giving it a strange power, but the March moon seems within the Earth's atmosphere, it's whiteness smudged into a different glow. A jig-saw sheet of clouds passes over, the centers are dark purple with light grey edges. Jupiter is there. An unseen owl is over the stream: HOO HOO HOOO / HOOOOO HOUT HU HOOO

April Moon: There is a 'green full moon' meme that's only 1/2 crazy because I do find that the spring air can give a blue-green tinge to a Moon when it is first rising. This moon seems small while Jupiter is blazing, a binocular sighting of the Jovian moons outshines this Moon in my memory. There is one clear picture the Moon seen through the tops of the Populars, illuminating the budding skinny branches. From Oct to March I can see the moonlight through skeletally bare popular branches, from May to September popular hide the Moon in leafy green, but tonight the branches are ornamented with thousands of little knobs silhouetted behind a ball of white.

May Moon: The horizon is full of leaves which the moon must now mount to be seen. A whippoorwill is going wild. For a bird that is supposedly rare, Whitefish seems to be infested with them and this one is near-by and screaming its name every 5 seconds.

I assumed that the whipoorwill's ominous mythological reputation grew from its' creepy appearance (which it shares with all the nighthawk family - they all have a python's wide mouth stuck on a pudgy bird's body) but now I'm beginning to wonder if its deafening call might play a apart. There is something unsettling to the insistence it brings to its call.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_whip-poor-will#Cultural_references

The landscape is aggressively alive in the May moonlight. The twilight flickers with pollen, blood-hungry insects, strange beetles and restless dusk birds, the tree have awoken from their winter slumber and drag their leafy fingers through the night air, things are moving in the forest and the brush beside me. The whipoorwill caps this tumultuous energy with it relentless call.  

The sky is clear but the moon reveals a halo of thin clouds as it emerges. Once again the seasonal course has turned my soul inside out. Winter is gone and will not be felt again until the first cool breeze of August.

At 9:05 I can see the sun setting from the middle of my living room, for 2/3 of the year I can not see this. The sun is at its western most setting position, it will spend a few days paused there and slowly retreat east until the winters solstice.

I don't want to write this because it sounds stupid. I know its all de-bunked. But the moon is glowing green! It must be some reflection off the sea of leaves it is arising from, or some atmospheric trick caused by the extremely windy day and dusk, big branches were breaking and slowly crashing down.

It is unmistakable green, it caught me in its vermillion glow when I first glimpsed the moonlight - I stared in disbelief.

The moon is a trickster. not is some mythical sense, it has literally tricked me: deluded me into making claims that were false, it has caused me social embarrassment through its tricks. I told people I saw a red hot-air balloon rising from Bell Park - and was wrong. I swore the moon appeared bigger near the horizon - until I used the old art trick of a measuring with a thumb on a pencil and realized my err. I publicly avowed that it was impossible that the Moon rotated at just the right ratio to eternally reveal only one side, the odds seemed impossible, now I know that planetary orbit coupling are common.

Add in those times were I've mistaken moonlight or its glare for something else. Now it's making me write about its green glow and it sounds silly. Curse you, Moon! You're embarrassing me again.

Proof of the Moon's deceptive nature:[list]
[*]Size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_illusion
[*]Red Balloon Shape: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090223.html
[*]Spin-orbit coupling/Orbital resonance/Tidal locking/Gravitational locking/Captured rotation/Synchronous orbit_rotation
[*]'Green' moon hoax:http://www.space.com/32599-green-moon-april-lunar-hoax-debunked.html[/list]



Also: Summer solstice full moon for the 1st time in decades
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/summer-solstice-full-moon-1.3640759

It is easy to forget about nature in summer. It is so plentiful you take it for granted. The 'animal-spotting diary' we keep gets thinnest in mid-July and August as we slack off in recording sightings. I almost missed the moon last night too.

A bright pale light got me out of bed, I couldn't sleep anyways because of a hurt back so I decided to get up and turn off whatever light source was illuminating the other room. Tracking down the source I soon ended up outside staring at a full moon skirting the top of the south-east tree line.

The clear night sky was so acid-washed by moonlight that it was more pale grey-blue than black. Only a dozen of the brighest stars remained. No flashlight needed to wander around outside at 1 am until I found a good spot to observe. The moon itself was modest, despite it's proximity to the horizon it appeared small, like a perfectly round lightbulb. Just a warm clear summer night with a radiant full moon.

Warm night air, the sky is bright with moonshine, where it shines appears to be covering with shining snowfall, the shadows are dark but the milder darkness of shadow cast by the Moon not the Sun.

The night hums. Treetops are always rustiling but I cannot find them with my eyes. Toads trill and so do tree frogs using their higher perch to fill the air. Crickets rhythmically chirp then go silent. Nature's on the modulation knob as whines de-shift into beats and back into hi-pitch whines.  It is a gentle hum, even the sole bird is shy, given soft questioning whistles. Gone are the woodcocks and whipperwillows who were aiming for the other side of the bay with their territorial calls.

The moonface is radiant, the sky is unclouded. The Daoist and Buddhist traditions use many Moon metaphors, including how a clear mind in like fresh moon. For them 'the Moon is good to think with' - just as for First Nations 'the bear is good to think with'. Judiasm-Christianity is the opposite, those are desert/Mediterranean Solar religions, I think Moses explicitly warns against Moon worship. Anything more to do with the Moon than calander-work is idolatry.

I hold my hand in a latticework to block out as much moonshine as I can but still see the Moon. It shrinks to a diamond, its' shadowed craters and dust seas more more perceivable. The leaves rustling have the slight rasp of brittleness from a hot summer.

Honking on the lake, hawthorn trees shake as a bear runs, the night air mild enough to cool my extremities. All of this an echo of early spring, yet now a cycle has run, the leaves are full, the chicks and pups born, the stars turned.

The moon is clear but shines off-white like the flat matte of egg shell. Almost nondescript. A touch dimmer than usual, I stare at it until a faint but persistent halo of subtle green-to-red is seen. Neither wind not cloud. There Earth seems hung between moments as the vernal equinox arrives.

The Full Moons will be the marker of mid-month until the year ends.

The Moon had that slight green glow again. The Titan of Winter, Orion, has re-emerged from his cold cave as the Sun's gaze relents and dims. Night now lasts from 7pm to 7am and its' shadow's stay lengthens each night.

The night before I had been staring at the Moon between huge backyard trees down in Cambridge, now it was above the smaller trees of the north. In both setting it was the appearance of Orion that most struck me.

To see the Moon and Orion in the same sky is to know you are now in winter's Empire of Night, yet October is that border month where the heat of summer can mix with the growing dark, and it was night of cooling but not cold, the sharp familiar aroma of cedar smoke from some unknown fire enriched the air. The trees are not yet bare and the Moon in the day is the perfect aerial adornment to the rich colours this autumn has produced.

I caught this "supermoon" as it set in the morning during my regular stroll with the dog and cats before heading to work.

The Moon was huge as it set across the lake in a sky dappled with hints of clouds illuminated by dawn. It an orange-bone color and the thickening atmosphere distorted it into something like a wrinkling old apricot mold-splotched by sea of dust. The reflection of the moon in the lake was a perfect rectangular pillar of light only blurred by patches of ripples on the steel-colored waters. The moon capped the pillar like the dot in the smaller-case 'i', but as the moon got lower the pillar shrank and distorted.

When it first met the horizon it look like the whole moon might just roll off to the left or right following the slope of the forest's horizon. Another few millimeters lowering and the tips of the tree came into silhouette like a desert caravan marching by. The lower the massive orange moon got the more resolution I could seen on the profiles of the shadowed tree tips - a row of triangular tipped evergreens. I simply stood and stared at the spectacle and the dog and cats happily hunkered down to enjoy an unseasonably mild mid-November dawn.

It has been 11 moons now*. This is the first full year I have ever measured in moons. It has meant that once a month I have tasked myself to go outside and soak up the season as night arrives, it was nice to catch the Moon at dawn.

(*I see I don't have a January entry.... I might have to extend this calendar into 2017 for a month)

Winter is a different realm. Grey twilight from dawn to creeping dusk, a brief illumination of snowy mists and soon darkness again.

The sky flows with layered cloud except for a round pool of placid night where the Moon has tunneled through the clouds like an ice-fishing hole. Occasionally clots of dark clouds pass between. Below the snow-laden evergreens and a shed-side are bejeweled with refracted RBG lasers. Snow flickers in the beams scatter-shot from pod of Canadian Tire faerie lights.

Now the lasers are off, the clouds fled west, and the Moon arced higher. The sky is primordial in its' bareness, all but the brightest stars are faded to nothingness by the intense moonshine. It is a winter's midnight clear and it stuns me. The nightsky shines with moonlight and the whiteness of the land, it is a textured blue, an organic iron blue. Orion's frame is visible from the nuclear glows of white at his joints, the Moon crowds the winter giant, occulting the Bull (Taurus) he chases, until only the Bull's eye (Aldebaran) can be seen in the halo of the Moon. 

The next morning the sky has closed again and snow blows wildly out of tree in strong gust. A few more hours and it will be dark again.