The Last Blue Moon of the Century

Where were you on New Year’s Eve, 2009? Chances are, where ever you chose to celebrate the incoming year, you welcomed it beneath a luminous blue moon.

At 4:30 p.m., I watched the moon rise over a frozen lake in the northern vastlands of Minnesota. With the temperature barely hovering at twenty below zero, the frigid stillness gave a surreal clarity and sharpness to the landscape.

While I was witnessing the Northern moon, over a thousand miles away, in Los Angeles, Lillian Elaine Wilson was out after midnight, documenting her West Coast version of a Blue Moon. Sweet!

Above: Blue Moon Over Disney Building, Burbank. Below: Blue Moon Over San Fernando Valley, from Studio City looking East. © 2009 Lillian Elaine Wilson

Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days compared to the lunar year. The extra days accumulate, so every two or three years there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a “blue moon.”

The Blue Moon on December 31, 2009 was the last Blue Moon of the Century.