How to check out Saturday’s Strawberry Moon

The Strawberry Moon of 2023 will be rising at the usual time in your part of the world in all its fullness on Saturday, June 3, and will reach maximum brightness at 11:41 EDT.

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Don’t expect it to be red. “Strawberry Moon” is one of the nicknames given to each of the full moons by the Native Americans, and it will appear in its usual golden and silver glory, according to the Economic Times. The Strawberry Moon heralds the peak of harvest season for strawberries, according to the Algonquin tribes. The tribes lived in the Northeast U.S., which has a short strawberry growing season, according to NASA.com.

It will be an expanded heavenly light show over the weekend, as the bright star Antares will appear a few degrees to the right of the moon, NASA said. Antares is about 600 million light-years away, a red star at the end of its life, now expanded to about 700 times as big as our sun.

Red stars blow up when their time is up, but relax. NASA says it’s far enough away from Earth to just look cool as a supernova. It’ll probably happen about a million years from now, so don’t send out your party invites yet.

Antares is classified as a supergiant because it’s so big, but it’s only about one millionth as dense as our sun and relatively cool, as stars go, burning at about 6,500 Fahrenheit compared to 10,000 for our sun.

It has already burned up all its hydrogen and is successively burning heavier atoms. That’s how supernovae come about, and it’s where all the atoms of all kinds, including the ones in us, come from. Supernovae explosions fling them out really far.

Other names for June’s full moon around the globe are the Mead or Honey Moon, Rose Moon, Flower Moon, Hot Moon, Hoe Moon, Planting Moon, Vat Purnima, Poson Poya and LRO Moon, according to NASA.