Myths of the moon

Lunar facts and fancies about the moon

by Patricia Maitland

Print off this list of notable night sky events and take it to the cottage with you!

There’s a Goldilocks Factor with the moon and maybe that’s why it’s so magical to us – especially at the cottage. While the sun is too bright to look at, and the stars are too small, the moon is just right. Even with the naked eye, we can discern its rough surface and see the fine edge of sunlight moving across its face, giving us a different-looking moon every night and different memories to cherish.

From Earth, we see only one side of the moon, but there are many sides to the story of why we are so bewitched by its presence. For thousands of years, we’ve been celebrating its magic in legends, songs, rituals, and superstitions. And no wonder – if the moon has the power to pull on our planet, why shouldn’t it tug on our imagination? Yet the facts about our moon are just as fascinating as the fancies it inspires. Green cheese aside, lunar phenomena such as tidal force, earthshine, and the horizon illusion don’t detract from the moon’s mystique but add to it. So, come the next full moon, why not grab your binoculars, a glass of wine, a friend, and be moonstruck.

Loony under the moon

The word “lunatic” (from the Latin luna for moon) was first used in 13th-century France – lunatique – to describe someone suffering intermittent insanity attributed to the changing phases of the moon. People even believed sleeping under the rays of a full moon could make you crazy.

Today, the jury is out on whether the full moon drives humans to act loonier than usual. Generally, scientists dismiss any correlation between lunar fullness and wonky human behaviour. Look at some statistics (compiled by the believers), though, and you’ll see notable increases in car accidents, calls to police, and even animal bites with the onset of a full moon. Ask psychiatric hospital workers, and they’ll tell you patient intake numbers skyrocket on full-moon nights. Same with ambulance drivers – some swear that they fetch more victims when the moon is full. As for the incidence of humans turning werewolf, we’ll leave that to the lunatic fringe.

And speaking of looniness, perhaps you assumed our cottage-country icon, the loon, was so named because of its crazy-sounding tremolo? A false charge, says Katherine Barber, editor of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. “Loon” is from an Old Norse word for the bird, “lomr.”

Animal insomniacs and binge-eaters

Do wolves really howl because of a full moon? This romantic notion may be based a bit in fact. David Bishop at the Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve explains that wolves howl to keep in touch with their own pack and to let other packs know when they’re trespassing, among other reasons. With the extra light on full moon nights, they may be more active and have more opportunities to vocalize. However, perhaps cottagers notice them more because we’re more active, too.

Not all wildlife gets friskier under a full moon, says biologist Franco Mariotti of Science North in Sudbury. Small critters like deer mice and flying squirrels cut down their activities and lay low to avoid the lunar spotlight and keen eyes of predators.

Birds are affected by the illumination, too. According to ornithologist Mark Peck of the Royal Ontario Museum, some species, especially those that are crepuscular (feeding at dusk), actually gain weight during a full moon because it allows them more time to chow down. Dieters, beware.

Other interesting facts:

• Packing the right clothes for the weather at the cottage is always a challenge, but on the moon, you’d need to borrow a few outfits from NASA. If there were a lake on the moon, it would boil in the day and freeze at night, with daytime highs reaching about 130°C and nighttime lows of at least -110°C.
• If you had a cottage on the moon, the drive one way would be about 384,000 km. That’s equal to 853 round trips from Toronto to Parry Sound.

• Practise your waxing/waning identification skills by following this easy rule: If the moon matches the shape of your left hand when it forms a “C,” it is waning. When it matches your right hand forming a backwards “C,” it is waxing. Keep hands hidden and your friends will never know.

• The tips of the crescent moon, called the “horns,” always face away from the setting or rising sun, which means they always point upward in the sky. Watch for paintings and photos that depict an “impossible moon,” with the horns pointed down.

The cowbird flew over the moon

A 17th-century poet claimed that birds spent winter on the moon, a fancy that may have been based on observation. In the 1950s, ornithologists discovered that we can actually watch the passage of migrating birds across the face of a full moon. Try it yourself this fall, with binoculars or a telescope, ideally at a known migration route. On a good night in the right place, you could see hundreds, even thousands of passing birds an hour.

Teeny weeny tides

Maybe you’ve never seen the tide go out on your lake, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t under the moon’s spell. Every water body on Earth (in fact, everything on Earth) is influenced by the moon’s gravitational pull – it’s just that the effect on smaller lakes is imperceptible to the eye. The oceans are another story: Massive bodies of free-flowing water, they visibly react to the moon’s pull by mounding up and dropping down on a daily basis, creating high and low tides. And very large lakes, like Superior, also show a bit of tidal action.

Just think, you’d never even hear those pwcs…

Unlike Earth, the moon has no atmosphere. And without atmosphere, there can be no sound transmission; the moon is silent. For the same reason, there is no blue sky on the moon. Without any atmospheric particles to refract and scatter light waves (which is how Earth gets its blue heavens), the moon’s sky is black, even during the daytime.

Same old view

Contrary to earlier beliefs, there is no “dark” side to the moon, just a “far side,” which has days and nights like those on the near side. But we never see this side because the moon’s rate of rotation has become (almost) synchronized with its orbit, thanks to the slowing force of Earth’s gravitational pull. It takes 291⁄2 days to go around our planet and 271⁄2 days to complete one rotation on its axis, thus presenting to Earthling cottagers the same side all the time.

Now if you had a cabin on Mars, you’d get to see both sides of the moon (albeit with a telescope). But remember those thermal undies – a hot day at the Martian equator might just get the temperature up to the freezing point.

Not bigger (but still better)

Why does the moon look so much larger when looming on the horizon? After years of bandying about theories on what causes the illusion, most astronomers finally agree it has to do with the juxtaposition of the moon against familiar background objects – whether a treeline, a roof, or the waves of the ocean. Maybe because we’re accustomed to looking straight ahead at a distant horizon instead of looking overhead, our eyes are more easily duped. Whatever the reason, it’s still one of nature’s greatest tricks.

See for yourself when the next big horizon moon comes along. Hold at arm’s length a coin big enough to just “cover” the moon (you can also use the end of your pinkie). Try this again four or five hours later and you’ll have your proof that it’s the same size moon.

Full moon... or not?

If you’ve ever found yourself unsure whether the moon is actually full or not, relax, you don’t need glasses. On the days preceding and following the full moon, it is 97–99 per cent illuminated, a difference barely discernible to the naked eye. So even if it’s cloudy on the night of the big one, you still get a couple of bonus almost-full moons.

What’s big and bright and red all over?

Arguably our most famous night light, the Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox. Because of its alignment with Earth at this time of year, this particular moon rises in the east almost exactly at the same time that the sun sets in the west. For the next several days, the moon rises only slightly later than the night before, unlike the rest of the year when it may rise as much as 70 minutes later than the previous evening. This succession of early-rise times allowed farmers to work in their fields after sunset, providing the most popular explanation for the moniker Harvest Moon.

What accounts for its famously reddish-orange hue? Sunlight (reflected off the moon) has all the colours of the spectrum, but red light waves, being longer than, say, blue, scatter less when they hit particles in Earth’s atmosphere. So our view of the moon is coloured, literally, by the dust, ash, haze, and other natural pollutants through which we see it.

Reddish-orange moons can happen during other months, but because the moon is very low to the horizon during the equinox and because September often brings warm days, cool nights, and more moisture – conditions that tend to trap more atmospheric “stuff” – we’ve come to associate this glorious sight with the one and only Harvest Moon.

When the blue moon hits your eye

In astronomy circles, a blue moon is the second full moon occurring in a month and, on average, it happens every 21⁄2 years. Yet this rare event isn’t what spawned the phrase “once in a blue moon.” Way back in its etymological history, a “blue moon” referred to an impossibility, something that would take place only if the moon turned the implausible colour of blue. But as it happened, in 1883, the moon did turn blue, sort of, through the dust and ash blown into the sky by the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa. When the phenomenon occurred again, because of huge dust storms in India in 1927 and forest fires in Alberta in 1951, “once in a blue moon” no longer signified never but rarely, and the meaning has carried on to the present day.

Photo: Randy Craig

Originally published in the October 2003 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

Copyright © 2003 by Cottage Life. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any article, photograph, or artwork, for other than personal use, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden.