Friday’s full moon is a blue moon, but don’t go looking for a change in color. The most accepted definition of a blue moon, is a full moon occurring on the last day of the month. It means there are two full moons in the month. There are 29 days, between two full moons, so it is a rare moment, indeed, for two full moons to coincide in one month.

Blue moon is more poetry than astronomy. Poets and lyricists see this moon as a rare moment in the life of a lover. Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald sang the song. You don’t have to fall in love tonight to enjoy the thought and especially contemplate the attention tonight’s full moon will spin. What story will arise from this Blue Moon?

A fully lit moon hanging in the southern skies will continue to dominate the nights ahead. The moon starts the weekend in the zodiacal constellation Capricornus and moves into Aquarius, passing near the distant and not visible planet Neptune on Tuesday night.

On Wednesday night the moon is in proximity to another distant planet, barely visible, Uranus in the zodiacal constellation Pisces.

Venus

The prettiest and brightest planet in our night sky is slipping away. Venus is appearing nightly lower and lower in the western sky. Last month, Venus was high in the west after sunset. Now, it is low in the west, soon to disappear entirely.

If you could look through a telescope at the distant planet, it would appear in the crescent phase and it would be large. Venus is only 29 million miles away, our closest neighbor. The sun is 93 million miles away.

In the race around the sun, Venus is about to overtake the Earth and move quickly into our morning sky.