7.6 day old moon
52 percent lit
April 20, 2018
By Daniel Patrick Sheehan
No telling (click here) how “Blue Moon” would have fared on the charts if it had been titled “Green Moon.”
A blue Moon is a real thing, after all. A green Moon is not.
Or is it? Word on the internet, which is always reliable, says the Moon will glow green in the sky tonight, thanks to the reflected light of Uranus.
Well, no, of course it won’t. Uranus is nearly two billion miles from the Moon, more or less, and couldn't reflect off it even if it wanted too.
No, the green Moon story is a hoax, apparently perpetuated in connection to today’s non-federal, non-state holiday, National Weed Day.
According to Snopes, the myth-debunking web site, the green Moon hoax dates back at least to 2016. The story claims, variously, that the green Moon was last seen 420 years ago, or maybe in 1847.
An old Facebook post explained the “phenomenon”:
“All night long...the seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus, will park itself near the moon. The green giant is only 4 degrees away from the moon. The cosmic odd-couple will appear about four degrees apart in the sky—equal to 8 full moons side-by-side.”
Various incarnations of the hoax have surfaced since, all of them replete with sly-to-obvious pot jokes....
