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There’ll be TWO supermoons above Manchester in August – shame literally no one could see the first one

A rare blue supermoon will be above Manchester in August

Daisy Jackson - 4th August 2023

We’ve all heard the expression ‘once in a blue moon’ – but now we mean it quite literally, with an ultra-rare meteorological event taking place in our skies this month.

August will see two full moons above our heads, both of which will be supermoons.

The massive spectacle began on 1 August with the first full moon of August, where Mancs were awe-struck at views of… absolutely nothing but clouds.

Giving real deja vu of the Northern Lights debacle from earlier this year, the north west’s wet summer weather meant that Manchester’s view of the first supermoon was massively obstructed.

That supermoon was known as a Sturgeon moon, after the abundance of giant sturgeon fish that appear in the waters in August.

We didn’t get to see it, at all, but we’ve got a second shot at a supermoon sighting this month, as August 2023 unusually has two full moons on its horizon.

One attempt to photograph the supermoon above Manchester:

The next one will take place on Thursday 31 August, with the moon appearing much bigger and brighter than usual due to its proximity to the Earth.

The second of these supermoons will technically be a blue moon, but that might not mean what you think it does.

Blue moons often aren’t literally blue – they only turn that sort of hue when there’s a rare atmospheric condition like a volcanic eruption, says the Royal Museum Greenwich. And no one wants one of those.

Blue moon is actually the name given to the second full supermoon of a calendar month, which only occurs roughly once every three years – the next one being in 2026.

And the next time we’ll get two blue moons in a year will be 2037…

So it’ll be all eyes to the sky on Thursday 31 August for that big blue supermoon above Manchester… weather permitting.

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Featured image: Alexandra Vo on Unsplash