Dave Anderson explains how it came to be called the Harvest Moon.

Did you see it? Did you see that full moon? This month it’s called the “harvest moon” which is the full moon that occurs closest to the annual autumnal equinox,  which occurred on Thursday September 23. 

The autumn equinox - when days and nights are of equal length - occurs when the sun appears to cross the celestial equator, an imaginary line in the southern sky, retreating from north to south. It marks the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.

“Harvest Moon” was so-named by farmers whose corn, pumpkins, squash and beans were traditionally ready for gathering and processing.

The relationship between moonlight and the harvest stems from the fact that in September, the moon's orbit is inclined only slightly to the horizon. From our perspective in the north, the late September full moon rises in the southeast only a bit later each evening which provides bonus hours of moonlight after sunset for farmers to continue to gather crops.

The convenience of modern “open all night” super-stores confuses our understanding of ancestral relationships between obtaining food, relative length of days and phases of the moon. There’s something genuinely primal about the autumn moonlight – even when seen from the perspective of a supermarket parking lot!

Get outside and be moon-struck! Gaze up at that nearly-full moon. Harvest moon is one occasion to reflect on the relationships our Native and European predecessors shared with the same landscape we now inhabit. They lived in accordance with annual celestial milestones many of us now fail to even recognize!