October Blood Moon Followed by November Lunar Eclipse
October's full moon--AKA blood moon-- is happening Sunday; it's the first full moon of Autumn. The next full moon in November will be a lunar eclipse!
According to the Farmer's Almanac, the best time to view the full moon is at sunset when it rises to take its place in the sky. Like September's Harvest Moon, the "Blood Moon" rises around the same time for several nights in a row, so you can start looking on Saturday night around 8:00 PM.
"As the moon drifts over the horizon around sunset, it may appear larger and more orange--how perfect for the fall season! But don't be fooled by the 'Moon Illusion,' which makes the Moon appear bigger than it really is."
In the spirit of Halloween, the full moon has been historically linked to one of our favorite monsters, the werewolf.
The Farmer's Almanac chronicles "One of the most enduring beliefs is that the full Moon can cause some people to act strangely, thus the common refrain of 'must be a full Moon' when things start to go haywire. This idea even made its way into our language, with words like 'lunacy' and 'lunatic' born from the Latin word 'luna' for 'moon.'
There are no statistically significant records indicating any connection between crime waves or full hospitals and the full moon, according to the National Geographic News, although it is worth noting that it develops a strong electric field near the surface as it swings through Earth’s magnetic “tail,” according to new observations from a Japanese probe (reported by NASA).
The notion of werewolves in connection to the full moon goes back to ancient Greek Mythology, according to History.com. The myth evolved in Western Europe to something akin to what we still hear about today: that humans who sleep under a full moon shape-shift into a hairy and blood-starved monster for a time, but exactly when that leap was made is debatable.