#2427 "Setting Blue Moon"

It is important as an artist to scrape your palette clean every now and again. That exercise allows you to get a fresh start. I always squeeze out a different colour to play with as well. One never knows where a bit of adventure might lead. This time I employed a squirt of Dioxazine Purple on my palette. If you look, there is a lot of purple to be found in nature. 

October 2020 enjoyed two full moons during the month which is just a quirk of the 2020 calendar as if 2020 needed any more peculiarities. This full moon was from Saturday October 31st. It is called a blue moon not because of the colour but because of its rarity. Moons can actually be coloured blue through the scattering of light by smoke or dust particles in the atmosphere. People witnessed blue moons for several years after the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. I got up and walked outside to admire the full moon at 4:40 am on Sunday morning. Gravity waves and deformation zones follow me around almost all of the time. I included the beautiful corona as well. Dale had the porch light on. 

Corona diffraction - Diffraction Pattern from a single drop

The light spectacle around the blue moon was the result of diffraction of the moonlight by individual small water droplets and ice crystals in the cloud. The angular diameter of a corona depends on the sizes of the water droplets involved. Smaller droplets produce larger coronae. The corona is the most pronounced when the size of the droplets is most uniform. This particularly spectacular corona suggested that the cloud droplets were both small and uniform in size. In contrast from coronae, atmospheric halos are formed by refraction of light through comparatively large ice crystals. There is no truth to the linkage of the atmospheric phenomena with the Mexican beer although the effects can be very similar in nature. 

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