What do strawberries, worms, and wolves have in common? No, this isn’t the start of a bad joke, I promise! They are all the names of seasonal full moons.

It’s become more common recently to refer to full moons by the poetic-sounding names that often come from different Native American nations.

This is doubly so if there’s something interesting going on, like a “supermoon” or lunar eclipse.

Each name tells you something about the month that the full moon will be visible in, describing animals that are active during that time, or flowering or fruiting plants to keep an eye out for.

The names are very practical, acting as a memory aid, and vary across the different nations depending on the type of climate they live in.

As we head into July, with the full moon falling at 3.36am tomorrow, you’ll be looking at the “Full Buck Moon”.

This tells us that in North America it’s the time when male deer, or “bucks”, start to regrow their majestic antlers, ready to show them off to the female deer, or use them to fight other males and fend off predators.

Given that you might be reading this in the UK, and you know how much we love talking about the weather, you might prefer to refer to the full moon as the “Full Thunder Moon”, so called because it rises as summer storms sweep in accompanied by rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning.

You might even be familiar with the phrase “make hay while the sun shines”, which is something that farmers normally do before the end of July.

Well, that explains why July’s full moon is sometimes known as the “Full Hay Moon” too!

But what about the other months? Those full moons have their own names too, of course.

Heading to the darkest time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, towards the winter solstice in December, you might look out for the “Full Cold Moon” shining stark and silver through the some of the longest nights, or the “Full Snow Moon” in February, which was very appropriate during the Beast from the East in 2018.

It’s possible you’ve come across dramatic descriptions like “Supermoon”, “Blood Moon” and “Blue Moon” too, which are a little different from the seasonal names, although they are no less interesting. It was an astrologer (not an astronomer!) who coined the term Supermoon back in 1979. That refers to a full moon that occurs when the Moon is closest to the Earth in its elliptical orbit, so it appears slightly larger in the sky, although this isn’t visible to the naked eye.

As the Moon’s orbit around Earth isn’t a perfect circle, sometimes it’s closer to the Earth, and sometimes it’s further away.

An astronomer would refer to these as perigee and apogee respectively, and the astronomical term for a supermoon is a perigean full moon.

A Blood Moon sounds a bit alarming, but there’s really nothing to worry about!

That’s just one of the aspects of a lunar eclipse, which is caused by the Earth casting a shadow as it passes between the Sun and Moon.

As the sunlight passes through the Earth’s atmosphere, most of the blue light is scattered but the red light makes it through.

The atmosphere acts like a lens too, bending that red light and focusing it on the Moon, so we see it turn a striking red.

At the other end of the spectrum is a Blue Moon, which doesn’t refer to the colour at all.

This is the third full moon in an astronomical season that has a bonus fourth full moon.

Or it’s the second full moon in a month that has two full moons.

The first description is the correct one, but the second is more common, even though it came about as a bit of a misunderstanding, which even ended up in an 80s edition of Trivial Pursuit!

Knowing a bit more about where they come from, I’m a big fan of using these names.

For as long as people have been people, we’ve been using the changing sky to help us keep track of time and the seasons and this is just another way to do that.

Perhaps you’d like to come up with your own Scottish versions of these names?

Would “Full Midgie Moon” have the same ring to it?