The Full Harvest Moon is upon us early Thursday morning, brightening the sky Wednesday night.
The moon reaches its fullest phase at 7:13 a.m. Thursday, an hour after it will have set in Baltimore. So it will be at its brightest here overnight Wednesday into Thursday. It will rise about 6:30 p.m. here, visible even before nightfall.
It gets its name for coming at harvest time, also known as the Full Corn Moon. The Harvest Moon is particularly well known because it helped farmers work by night to harvest their crops. That's because while it typically rises about 50 minutes later each night, that time is shorter, only about 25 to 30 minutes in the U.S., around the harvest moon, according to the Farmer's Almanac.
Though the harvest moon is associated with autumn, this one comes as the fourth one of the summer season. (That made last month's full moon a blue moon, by one definition.) Fall is officially only a few days away.