Enigma of supermoon

While waiting to be fetched, it was a night that the moon has its atypical manifestation. Long before, the moon has been an object of worship, veneration, and intrigue among ancient civilizations for thousands of years. And the other night, it captured our admiration once again as the biggest and brightest full moon of the year dazzled the night’s sky.

The moon has been covered in fantasies and legends for a large number of years, many of which still hold on right up 'til today. For instance, there are numerous who believe that full moons can make an individual frantic, cause catastrophic events, and increment wrongdoing rates. These convictions have their underlying foundations in antiquated religions and superstitions. For sure, the words "lunacy" and "insane person" originate from the Roman goddess of the moon, Luna.

Antiquated healers and wellbeing experts had confidence in a solid association among insanity and the moon. For example, Philosopher and student of history, Pliny the Elder (23 – 79 AD), kept up that full moons had an especially impact upon our minds, being the 'moistest' organ, and this brought about more wrongdoing and viciousness. Individuals on preliminary for homicide could battle for a lighter sentence on the grounds of lunacy if the wrongdoing happened amid a full moon.

Maybe in light of the fact that the menstrual and lunar cycles are comparative long, numerous early civilizations trusted that the moon controlled ladies' monthly cycle and could decide when ladies could end up pregnant. Old Assyrian celestial writings give counsel with respect to when ladies are most fertile.

And maybe the best legend including the full moon is the ever-popular werewolf, a fanciful or folkloric human with the capacity to shapeshift into a wolf or wolf-like animal during a full moon.

An astonishing legend about the moon from Bukidnon, Mindanao tells us that one day in the times when the sky was close to the ground a spinster went out to pound rice. Took off the beads from around her neck and the comb from her hair, and hung them on the sky, which at that time looked like coral rock. And each time that she raised her pestle into the air it struck the sky. For some time she pounded the rice, and then she raised the pestle so high that it struck the sky very hard and it went up so far that she lost her ornaments. Never did they come down, for the comb became the moon and the beads are the stars that are scattered about.

And likely, it was due to an event that happened eight days earlier, on March 11 of that year: the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which registered 9.1 on the Richter scale; in its aftermath, some speculated that the moon's gravitational pull could trigger earthquakes.

In a review article entitled "Much Ado About the Full Moon," James Rotton of Florida International University and Ivan Kelly of the University of Saskatchewan surveyed 37 studies on connections between the period of the moon and several types of lunacy. This meta-examination, published in the diary Psychological Bulletin, found very few statistically significant connections between the moon and human conduct.

Those studies that do find links, Rotton and Kelly said, are inaccurate, either because they don't take important factors into account or they mistake chance events as proof of a lunar effect.

Indeed, the sparkling silver sphere found in the night sky has caught the imaginative energy of humans for whatever length of time that man has strolled the earth and looked up at the cosmos, and the evening we can appreciate it in all its startling beauty.