Hunter's Moon

The Hunter’s Moon is defined by sequence rather than by month: it is whichever full moon follows the Harvest Moon, usually in October. With the fields cut and the game fattened for winter, the same run of early-rising bright evenings that helped bring in the harvest now helped with the hunt.

It shares the Harvest Moon’s shallow-angle property, so the short night-to-night rise delay continues, though slightly less pronounced.

This moon is sometimes called the Blood Moon, and the name causes constant confusion. It refers to the slaughter season — livestock killed and preserved before winter — and to the reddish haze of autumn air. It has nothing whatever to do with a lunar eclipse, which is the other, entirely separate thing people mean by “blood moon”. During a total lunar eclipse the moon really does turn coppery red, because the only sunlight reaching it has been bent through the whole ring of Earth’s sunrises and sunsets.

Also known as

• Dying Grass Moon
• Travel Moon
• Blood Moon (unrelated to eclipses)

The 1778 record

Travelling among the Dakota in 1766 and 1767, Captain Jonathan Carver wrote down all twelve month names in a single passage. Published in 1778, it predates the almanac list by roughly a century and a half and is the oldest independent check on these names.