The harvest moon – the full, orange moon that reliably appears every autumn – has been a blessing for pre-Industrial Age farmers harvesting crops and an inspiration for songwriters from the Tin Pan Alley era to Neil Young. .

It’s called the harvest moon because the moon rises about the same time every evening for a few nights in a row in the Northern Hemisphere.

In China, they celebrate the harvest moon with mooncake pastries and lanterns at their Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival, because they believed the moon was at its brightest and fullest size.

 And in Christianity, if the moon appears before the spring equinox, it’s known as the lenten moon marking the last full moon of winter.

If it appears after the equinox, it’s known as the paschal moon to mark the first full moon of spring.

Because the moon completes its final cycle around 11 days before the Earth’s orbit finishes, every two-and-a-half years, a blue moon occurs.

If a full moon occurs while the moon is at apogee, it is called a micromoon

The moon appears red because the sun is completely obscured by the earth, so the only light that reaches the moon is from Earth’s atmosphere