Today offers a great opportunity to widen my focus a bit and celebrate the appearance of the Blue Moon of 2015. These “extra” seasonal full months, the 13th full moon of a calendar year, happen about every three years: our last blue moon appeared in the summer of 2012 and we won’t see another one until 2018. These occasions are a perfect examples of how man and nature are seldom in sync: the creation of the calendar created the blue moon, which is apparently never really blue unless there some even more unusual astronomical conditions are present. It is always nice to wonder, and be reminded that Nature is our master and will not be boxed in by man’s organization of time. Cultural representations of the blue moon all focus on its rarity: “once in a blue moon” the earth is cast in a new/blue light and anything can happen.
Metropolitan Printing Co. poster c. 1906, Library of Congress; Ball Under the Blue Moon, Georges Barbier illustration for ‘Fetes Galantes’ by Paul Verlaine, 1928; “Blue Moon” by Dong Kingman, 1942, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Frank Ward, Blue Moon over Wolverhampton, 1958, Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage; “Lunar Rocket” furnishing fabric by Eddie Squires (amazing! celebrating Apollo 11), 1969, Victoria & Albert Museum.
