Once in a Blue Moon

[Glenn]

If you got something that happens only once in a "Blue Moon" (perfect forge welds?) tonight is your chance.

A blue moon, the second full moon in a calendar month. What makes tonight's lunar occurrence particularly cool is that only the Americas will have one this week: Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia won't get a blue moon until late June. And residents of New Zealand will have to wait until the end of July to see one. "It's just an accident of the calendar," said Marni Berendsen, education project coordinator for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco.

While there have been many meanings to the term "blue moon" over the ages, it has taken on its most current one only since the end of World War II. In 1946, an article in Sky & Telescope magazine inadvertently deviated from the widely understood definition of the time and called it the second full moon in a calendar month. Previously, blue moons had been known in farmers' almanacs as the third full moon in any season with four full moons.
The current definition, even though it was a mistake, was accidentally repeated in a National Public Radio program on astronomy in 1980.


Reference:Mercury News



Over the next twenty years there will be a total of 17 blue moons, with an almost equal number of both types of blue moons occurring. No blue moon of any kind will occur in the years 2006, 2011, 2014, and 2017.

[IronPuppet]

Supper cool, Glenn! The perfect night to do something new.

Come to think of it, my wife got her hair cut today and her and her mom were gardening in the rain. How often does that happen?

I can honestly say once in a blue moon.

Time for me to do the dishes and the laundry and make the bed!

Christopher