Sorry for the inconvenience: the apocalypse won’t be caused by an asteroid next month and the Super Blue Blood Moon won’t be the harbinger of humanity’s annihilation either.
On Wednesday, people around the world will look up at the night sky and see a big ol’ crimson moon. While certain spiritual scripture might mention the blood moon as a signal of the end of days, we here at Inverse promise that this upcoming lunar occurrence will just be really cool and not deadly at all.
You might have seen some sensationalist coverage citing passages from the Book of Revelations — the final book of the New Testament — that mentions the blood moon as a message from on-high. While we can’t certainly guarantee that the world won’t end on Wednesday, or even this very second, there have been plenty of religious prophecies claiming the world will end that have not come true.
The most recent doomsday flop came from Christian numerologist, David Meade, who claimed events like Hurricane Harvey and the past solar eclipse were foreshadowing the end of humanity. Well, we’re still breathing and we most likely will be after Wednesday as well.
Blood moons occur when the sun, Earth, and moon align so the moon passes through the Earth’s shadow. This causes the light from the sun to pass through our atmosphere, which scatters more blue light than red, causing Earthlings to see a reddish-colored moon.
This has happened many times before without the the Earth being swallowed up by hellfire. So it’s pretty safe to say that this time will be the same.
All that said, this Super Blue Blood Moon isn’t your average blood moon. It’s a actually a pretty rare crossover of three lunar occurrences happening simultaneously. The last time this happened was in 1866 making this a pretty rare celestial event.
So don’t worry about the world ending on Wednesday — you can do that literally every other day. Just grab your telescope and take some sweet pictures of this moon, it’s sure to be stellar.
