“What’s in a name? That which we call a July Full Moon
By many other names would shine as bright.”
My apologies to William Shakespeare, but I simply couldn’t resist mangling the above famous quote from Romeo and Juliet.
Full Moons have a myriad of names. Here in the United States the colonists adopted many of them from Native Americans, predominantly the eastern Algonquin nation. While these descriptive names have become the primary ones by which we identify each Full Moon, many other names have been ascribed to them.
For example, the July Full Moon is usually called the Full Buck Moon. This name was one brought over by the colonists from Europe. Male deer in both Europe and North and South America shed their antlers yearly, and by July a new set has emerged. Another old-world name for this Full Moon is Hay Moon, signaling when the hay field had been reaped. And finally Thunder Moon has been used for obvious reasons during northern hemisphere summer months.
Continue reading A Minimal Penumbral Lunar Eclipse and Two “Meteorocre” Shooting Star Displays