Was February 1865 the only month with no full moon? No, no it wasn’t. Sorry to disappoint yet again, but the good old viral content has yet again let people down. But here’s the thing. It has happened and will happen again. To be precise, many reading this now may have been alive when it last occurred.
What comes with creating viral content on the internet? Some fame, the ability to say that you went viral? To become an internet star? Personally I’d prefer to be an internet millionaire than an internet star, but that’s just me. Apart from a fleeting moment of stardom, there’s little else to warrant making such content spread like an infectious disease. That’s exactly how I view misleading myths. As infectious diseases. While you won’t get sick, they can be convincing enough that people will believe it. It seems like if someone took twenty seconds to write a sentence or two of made up crap it’s totally believable, but if someone else looks into it and debunks it with backed up facts, it isn’t true. So, yeah, it can be difficult at times. Now lets look into why the claim that February 1865 was the only month with no full moon is false.
While it is possible for February not to have a full moon, as the lunar cycle is 29.5 days, and February has 28 days, excluding a leap year, February 1865 actually had a full moon. You read that right, it did have one. To be precise, it occurred on February 10, 1865. But there have been February’s that have had no full moons, and if you were born prior to February 1999 you could have witnessed one yourself.
One of the most recent Februaries with no full moon was in 1999. Perhaps the reason that no one really thinks about it is that full moons happen twelve times a year, and to miss one in a month isn’t really that big a deal. The next one will be in 2018. Over the course of a thousand years, from 2000 to 2999 there are going to be 48 Februaries without a full moon, and even three leap year Februaries (29 days) with out one. These years will result with both January and March each having two full moons. The ones in January will be late on the 31st and the one in March will be early on the 1st.
