Spellbreakers Ep. 168: The Blue Micromoon is Here

A quieter news week calls for a quieter show, and host Matt Trump delivers: a warm, wide-ranging meditation on the blue micro moon arriving this weekend. Matt traces the surprisingly tangled history of the term "blue moon" from a 1528 anticlerical English pamphlet through a famous 1946 misprint in Sky and Telescope that accidentally defined the phrase as we know it today. He also covers when the moon literally turns blue from volcanic ash and wildfire smoke, the physics of the moon's elliptical orbit, the optical illusion of the horizon moon, and the jaw-dropping fact that the sun and the moon appear almost the same size in the sky. Along the way, he pays tribute to the 39 men of Torpedo Squadron 8 who flew into the Battle of Midway without fighter cover and saved the Pacific War with their lives.