How to catch a glimpse of the blue supermoon tonight

Monday’s full supermoon – also a blue moon – turned red in a dramatic way on Sunday night.

The glowing sphere has been seen across the UK but there is still a chance to catch a glimpse in the coming days.

Despite being called a blue moon, the moon doesn’t actually turn blue.

But, it did turn red on Sunday night because of North American wildfire smoke sitting in the atmosphere above the UK.

Smoke particles mean that light passing through the atmosphere is scattered in such a way that the orange and red colours of the spectrum are more visible than usual.

The smoke also meant skies were hazy and had an orange tinge over the weekend with an impressive sunset on Sunday night.

Smoke particles will start to clear on Monday as cloud and rain moves in from the west.

As the lunar cycle is 29.5 days, eventually this gets out of sync with our calendar where you normally have one full moon a month.

Blue moons are most commonly defined when we get an extra, 13th full moon in the year.

So the second full moon in a month becomes the blue moon.

However this blue moon comes from an alternative, more traditional definition when the lunar cycle results in any season having four, not three full moons.

So where we’d normally have three full moons each season. If there are four, the third full moon is then given the status of a blue moon.

As blue moons are not that common, it’s thought where the phrase “once in a blue moon” comes from.

This full moon also happens to be a “supermoon”.

A supermoon occurs when the full Moon coincides with when the moon is at its closest point to earth in its orbit – the perigee.

It can appear brighter and larger in the night sky.

This is the first of four supermoons this year.

The full moons of September, October – the closest moon this year – and November will also be supermoons.

The full blue supermoon will become 100% full at 19:25 BST on Monday evening but many us of may not actually get to see it.

Moon rises at around 20:50 BST in the roughly east sky and will then set on Tuesday morning at around 06:35 in the western sky.

However, the weather forecast is not looking all that favourable with cloud and patchy rain spreading eastward across the UK.

There will be some limited times where the skies should clear at different stages of the night.

While the blue supermoon won’t technically be full on Tuesday night, it’ll still be near-full and there’ll be greater chance of clear skies.