The last seasonal black moon occurred on May 19. 2023.
“It’s mostly just folklore,” Chris Elledge, treasurer of the amateur telescope makers of Boston, or ATMOB, said in a phone interview Thursday. “We don’t pay attention to that.”
This black moon will rise in the sky on Saturday beginning about 2 a.m., but because it’s a new moon — the phase of the moon’s cycle where the moon is between the sun and the earth — it won’t be visible.
“There won’t be anything up there to see,” Kerry Lynn, vice president of ATMOB, said in a phone interview Thursday. “The fact that this thing is a new moon is completely a non-event, but the fact that it’s a so-called black moon, that’s a little bit rare.”
But, according to Farmers’ Almanac, the definition of a black moon “can vary” so much that any new moon can technically be classified as a black moon.
Melanie Meadors, the public outreach coordinator at Aldrich Astronomical Society, said the term black moon is ironic, because every new moon is invisible to the naked eye.
“It’s not really an official astronomical term,” she said in a phone interview Thursday. “It’s kind of just the way the calendar lines up.”
“It’s nothing super unusual,” she added.
In the 29.5 day lunar month, a new moon shows up once, according to NASA.
“In this phase, the Moon is in the same part of the sky as the Sun and rises and sets with the Sun,” their website reads.
Because the sun illuminates the part of the moon facing away from earth, the new moon becomes invisible in the night sky.
In the days following the appearance of a new moon, there is a possibility that “earth glow” will illuminate the outer edges of the moon, said Meadors.
“During twilight or even during the day, you can kind of see light that’s reflected from the earth reflects off the moon,” she said.
Lynn speculated that media “hype” for the black moon may be due to the coinciding “parade of planets” also occurring this month, where six planetary orbits have lined up, making them all visible together.
“When there’s more than one thing happening in the sky at once, then people tend to get kind of excited about it,” he said.
Even though the black moon isn’t really a true phenomenon, Meadors said it is still “really good for publicity” for the astronomical community.
“Especially now with funding and things like that being in danger, it’s always good to get people to start looking up and realizing how great space is,” she said.
The next black moon is set to occur Aug. 31, 2027, according to Space.com.
Truman Dickerson can be reached at truman.dickerson@globe.com.
