A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
hunter’s moon
The hunter’s moon is the full moon after the harvest moon, usually falling in October. It shares the harvest moon’s particular property: for several nights running, the moon rises only a little later each evening instead of the usual fifty minutes, so there is bright moonlight in the early evening for most of a week rather than one night.
Etymology
The name is English and records what the light was used for. With the fields cut and the game out in the open stubble, the run of bright evenings was the time to hunt, and the moon got named for the work exactly as the harvest moon did. Most traditional full-moon names in English and in the North American traditions they were later mixed with follow the same logic, naming the month for what happens in it.
Notes
The short interval between moonrises is geometry. The moon’s path makes a shallow angle with the horizon at this time of year in the northern hemisphere, so its nightly eastward movement translates into only a small delay in rising. The effect is strongest at high latitudes and reverses in the southern hemisphere, where the equivalent moons fall in spring.