Ever wonder why we say ‘once in a blue moon’? May’s full moon schedule sheds some light. This Sky Above includes Halley’s Comet sightings and NASA’s safe splashdown.
SEATTLE —
May arrives with not one but two full moons, a rare celestial double that produces what skywatchers call a blue moon.
The month’s first full moon rises May 1, known in Native American tradition as the flower moon, also called the budding moon, the egg-laying moon and the planting moon, all names tied to the renewal of spring. The second full moon follows May 31, earning the blue moon designation simply because it is the second full moon within a single calendar month.
Here’s why there are two: the moon completes its orbit around Earth once every 29.5 days. The moon must travel slightly farther than 360 degrees to realign with the sun relative to the moving Earth, which hurtles through space at roughly 67,000 miles per hour. That orbital math means most months see only one full moon. May’s 31-day span is just wide enough to fit two.
A new moon falls between the pair on May 16.
The annual Eta Aquarids meteor shower, produced by debris shed by Halley’s Comet, peaks in the pre-dawn hours of May 5 through May 7.
The shower can produce up to 50 meteors per hour under ideal conditions. Observers should look east in the hours before sunrise. The shower’s main obstacle this year is its timing: the peak falls close to the May 1 full moon, meaning bright moonlight could wash out fainter meteors. Watching on May 7 or 8, once the moon has shifted, may offer better viewing. Check local moonrise and moonset times and get as far from artificial light as possible.
Halley’s Comet itself will not return to the inner solar system until 2061. Earth passes through its debris trail each spring, however, generating the Eta Aquarids without fail.
Venus has been hanging low on the western horizon at dusk but will climb higher through the month as an evening star. Jupiter and the crescent moon will appear to pair up on May 19, creating what some call a smiley face in the night sky. Saturn and Mars are best viewed in the morning sky and will become increasingly prominent as the year goes on, offering rewarding views through a backyard telescope from a dark location.
New York City hosts Manhattanhenge on May 28 and 29, when the setting sun aligns perfectly between the skyscrapers lining Manhattan’s street grid. Because Manhattan’s grid runs slightly off true west, the alignment happens in late May rather than at the equinox.
Seattle has its own version. Because the city’s streets run directly east-west, the sun sets in perfect alignment with downtown avenues on the fall equinox. Seattle Henge is set for Sept. 21, when viewers looking west down Second Avenue and other downtown streets should see the sun framed between buildings including Smith Tower.
Artemis II: a mission recap and what comes next
Four NASA and Canadian Space Agency astronauts are back on Earth after completing humanity’s first crewed journey to the vicinity of the moon since 1972, successfully splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego on April 10.
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, commander; Victor Glover, pilot; Christina Koch, mission specialist; and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, mission specialist, flew a total of 694,481 miles during their nearly 10-day mission aboard the Orion spacecraft, which the crew named Integrity.
The mission carried several history-making milestones. Koch became the first woman to travel to the vicinity of the moon. Glover became the first Black astronaut to do so. Hansen became the first Canadian. The four had been training together since their crew was selected in April 2023.
Speaking before launch from quarantine at Kennedy Space Center, Glover expressed hope that the milestones would eventually feel ordinary.
During the April 6 lunar flyby, Orion surpassed the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970, traveling farther from Earth than any humans had ever been. The record fell before the spacecraft even reached the moon because the moon’s elliptical orbit currently places it farther from Earth than it was during the Apollo era.
At that moment, the crew proposed naming a lunar crater after Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020. The crater sits near the boundary between the near side and far side of the moon, in a position where it can be seen from Earth at certain points in the lunar cycle.
During the April 6 flyby, the crew worked in rotating pairs at Orion’s windows, with one astronaut photographing the surface through a telephoto lens while another narrated observations aloud to mission control. The other two crew members supported by managing communications and swapping memory cards. All four astronauts rotated through window time.
The data haul from that single pass was substantial. The crew captured more than 7,000 images and 175 gigabytes of imagery and audio data from the far-side pass alone, a trove that NASA researchers and scientists from partner nations around the world are expected to analyze for months and years.
Within 24 hours of the flyby, scientists were already announcing early findings. Crew members reported seeing green hues around the Aristarchus plateau — a color NASA scientists said helps reveal the chemistry of lunar material — as well as varying brown tones and the topography of the terminator, the boundary between the lunar day and lunar night. They also captured meteoroid impact flashes on the moon’s night side, which had not been expected, and imaged a solar eclipse from lunar orbit as the moon blocked the sun from Orion’s vantage point.
The crew also passed through a planned communications blackout as Orion swung behind the moon during its closest approach, a tense but expected interruption that tested systems and procedures ahead of future surface missions.
Before the flyby began, the crew was woken by a pre-recorded message from the late Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell, who had passed away in late 2025. In the recording, made in August 2025, Lovell welcomed the Artemis II crew to “his old neighborhood” and reflected on Apollo 8’s first close look at the moon in 1968.
Orion’s crew module separated from the service module at 7:33 p.m. EDT on April 10, exposing its heat shield. The spacecraft entered Earth’s atmosphere traveling roughly 35 times the speed of sound at an altitude of 400,000 feet and encountered temperatures of approximately 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit during re-entry.
After a planned six-minute communications blackout caused by plasma buildup around the capsule, Orion deployed drogue parachutes near 22,000 feet and then unfurled three main parachutes near 6,000 feet, slowing it to splashdown speed. The spacecraft splashed down at 5:07 p.m. PDT.
Recovery teams from NASA, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force extracted the crew in open water and transported them by helicopter to the USS John P. Murtha for initial medical evaluations. A brief communications issue between Orion and recovery teams delayed the initial approach to the capsule but was resolved without incident. The crew returned to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on April 11.
“Artemis II proved the vehicle, the teams, the architecture, and the international partnership that will return humanity to the lunar surface.” Amit Kshatriya, NASA Associate Administrator.
What comes next: Artemis III and IV
The Artemis program’s next mission, Artemis III, is scheduled for 2027. That flight will remain in Earth orbit and focus primarily on testing docking procedures with lunar landers — one from SpaceX and one from Blue Origin — that need to be validated before a crew can use them to descend to the surface. One or both landers may launch ahead of the crewed mission.
Artemis IV, currently targeted for 2028, is planned to be the first mission to actually land humans on the moon, with the South Pole as the target landing region. Images gathered by the Artemis II crew along the terminator captured lighting conditions similar to those at the South Pole, giving mission planners valuable advance information about terrain and illumination.
NASA’s longer-term goal is to establish a sustained human presence on the moon as a stepping stone to eventual missions to Mars, including a lunar base with a nuclear power source that could eventually be adapted for use on the Martian surface.
The Lunar Gateway space station program, which had been planned as an orbiting waypoint, was canceled in March 2026.
Artemis II by the numbers:
Launch: April 1, 2026, 6:35 p.m. EDT — Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39B
Splashdown: April 10, 2026, 5:07 p.m. PDT — Pacific Ocean off San Diego
Total distance flown: 694,481 miles
Farthest distance from Earth: 252,756 miles — a new human record
Closest approach to moon: 4,067 miles above the lunar surface
Images captured: More than 7,000 during the lunar flyby alone
Data collected: 175 gigabytes of image and audio data from the far-side pass