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agate_ t1_iu5i5g8 wrote

It’s 100% media marketing. Full moons have been happening forever, and some are a little bigger, and sometimes two happen in a month, or one happens near an equinox, but nobody cared because apart from eclipses, these things are pretty subtle and uninteresting.

But in the past ten years, 24-hour news and weather media outlets have realized that you can get a bunch of viewers to tune in to an exciting breaking story about a super blood vampire moon, and it works because people these days are a lot more likely to like and share a news story than they are to actually go outside and look at it and realize it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Named winter storms are the same way. They’re just the same blizzards we’ve always had, but a weather channel has started giving them names and running breathless nonstop coverage about “hunkering down” and “major disaster”.

Here are the moon phenomena worth paying attention to: solar eclipse, lunar eclipse, and maaaaybe a big occultation if you’re a nerd. Everything else is just media hype.

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Xeglor-The-Destroyer t1_iu5skqp wrote

Full moon "articles" are basically the lowest of low effort content. Full moons happen on a schedule (a schedule that other people have already worked out for the news sites so they don't have to do any original work), there's basically nothing new to say about them, but you can still run advertisements against those articles. The moon also conveniently dovetails with the reader demographics who think astrology and horoscopes have real power. It's basically free money, and I think that's the causal driver because we know that news rooms have been in decline for a while. Real journalism is hard work and costs time + money, clickbait is effortless and cheap to churn out.

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Snagmesomeweaves OP t1_iu5rkzy wrote

Yeah, I’ve been seeing the names get more and more absurd like you mentioned which is why I wanted to ask this. I figured the big events were just eclipses, or if we got a large dust storm and it blew across the Atlantic and tints the moonlight.

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Significant_Sign t1_iu606u5 wrote

And it dovetails with a rise in interest in old superstitions, neo-paganism, etc. Even the Christian fundamentalists who've been taken in by q-conspiracies talk about these bloodmoons signifying important events - back in the 80s when I was a child being raised in a slightly-fundie church you would never use the same vocab as the superstitious people. It's no longer just the aging flower children who were always a minority, it's very widespread across many demographics that add up to lots of people.

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TalkinAboutSound t1_iu5b2wc wrote

Each month's full moon has a name! A blue moon is the second full moon in a month and a blood moon is when it looks reddish. A super moon is when it appears larger than normal. Other than that, they're not really any different!

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Nerull t1_iu5jz51 wrote

The Farmers Almanac gave every month's moon a name, with the blue moon being the second full moon in a month, if there is one. Some of these are traditional names, some of them they probably just made up.

You see them a lot lately because they get clicks.

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Aloh4mora t1_iu5kg83 wrote

I heard it was a Native American tradition that each full moon has a name. It's similar to how every 2-week "term" of time has its own unique name in the traditional Chinese lunar calendar.

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Foxs-In-A-Trenchcoat t1_iu5miz8 wrote

Yes. These are all Native American terms, and it sucks that the media isn't giving them any credit.

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fulanomengano t1_iu5dmbl wrote

There are 12, one for each lunar month. When there’s a 13th moon (it happens every few years because the lunar month has ~30 days, hence a lunar year is ~360 days), the second moon in a calendar month is called a blue moon. It gets a little trickier because in some years there are Februaries without moon and I think there can be 2 calendar months with 2 moons.

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space-ModTeam t1_iu6br6z wrote

Hello u/Snagmesomeweaves, your submission "[Question] Why does it seem like there are so many (insert Adjective/Noun) Moons all the time?" has been removed from r/space because:

  • Such questions should be asked in the "All space questions" thread stickied at the top of the sub.

Please read the rules in the sidebar and check r/space for duplicate submissions before posting. If you have any questions about this removal please message the r/space moderators. Thank you.

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