Ordinarily the date tie-in for each month's column deals with something like forgotten technologies (a favorite of mine). For variety's sake perhaps it would make sense to relate this month's tie-in to some significant blues event. But some events simply leap out at you and demand to be noticed. So it is with December's full moon which coincides with the winter solstice and the moon's perigee.
An e-letter has been making the rounds letting us know about the significance of the event. It reads:
This year will be the first full moon to occur on the winterI admit that I like getting information of this sort, but have learned to be a bit dubious about important information that makes the rounds of the web. After all, there's something wrong with that first sentence that tells us that "this year will be the first full moon to occur...". If this event happened 133 years ago, as we're told later in the letter, why is this the "first"? In other words, one doesn't get the feeling that an astronomer wrote the letter, but it still draws our attention and excites us.
solstice, Dec.22, commonly called the first day of winter.
Since a full moon on the winter solstice occurred in conjunction with
a lunar perigee (point in the moon's orbit that is closest to Earth),
the moon will appear about 14% larger than it does at apogee (the
point in it's elliptical orbit that is farthest from the Earth).
Since the Earth is also several million miles closer to the sun at
this time of the year than in the summer, sunlight striking the moon
is about 7% stronger making it brighter. Also, this will be the
closest perigee of the Moon of the year since the moon's orbit is
constantly deforming.
If the weather is clear and there is a snow cover where you live, it
is believed that even car headlights will be superfluous. On December
21st, 1866 the Dakota Sioux took advantage of this combination of
occurrences and staged a devastating retaliatory ambush on soldiers
in the Wyoming Territory.
In laymen's terms it will be a super bright full moon, much more than
the usual AND it hasn't happened this way for 133 years!
Our ancestors 133 years ago saw this.
Our descendants 100 or so years from now will see this again.
Remember, this will happen December 22, 1999.
Happy Full Moon! Happy Winter's Solstice! Happy New Millennium!
In my ongoing search for the truth, however, I felt it necessary to try and verify this information via the web. Happily, I discovered one web page that nicely confirms the letter, though its source is rather unclear, and another page from Texas A&M International University that reports astronomical events for 1999 with comments from two members of the astronomy faculty. This page also confirms that the solstitial full moon is definitely something to behold.