What's a 'blood moon'? Why this month's full worm moon will be unlike any other
This week's full moon won't just be any regular full moon.
For the first time in three years a lunar eclipse will adorn the night sky, appearing to turn a dazzling red color thus giving it the name "blood moon."
According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, March's full moon is also known as a "worm moon."
The "blood worm moon" will take place on the night of March 13 and will last into the early hours of the morning on March 14. The full moon will be visible from Tennessee beginning at 10:57 p.m. Central and will reach peak illumination at 1:55 a.m. on March 14, said the almanac.
Here's what to know.
Blood moons happen during a total lunar eclipse, when the moon is fully in Earth's shadow and a little bit of light from Earth's sunrises and sunsets falls on the surface of moon, making it appear red.
"During a lunar eclipse, the moon appears red or orange because any sunlight that's not blocked by our planet is filtered through a thick slice of Earth's atmosphere on its way to the lunar surface," said NASA. "It's as if all the world's sunrises and sunsets are projected onto the moon."
The Old Farmer's Almanac derives moon names from various places, including including Native American, Colonial American, and European sources. For years, it was believed the name referred to the earthworms that appear as the soil warms in spring.
However, further research revealed that in the 1760s, Captain Jonathan Carver visited the Naudowessie (Dakota) and other Native American tribes. He wrote that the term "worm moon" actually referred to beetle larvae, which start to emerge from thawing tree bark and other winter shelters during the spring period.
Thursday's full moon coincides with an impending storm system, which is set to bring potentially severe weather to Middle Tennessee. According to the National Weather Service, all of Middle Tennessee has a 40-70% chance of light rain Thursday.
Middle Tennessee will experience some cloud cover on Thursday, which is expected to clear by late afternoon or early evening, said National Weather Service Meteorologist Ryan Husted. Clouds are then expected to return before sunrise on Friday as moisture moves in from the south ahead of the approaching storm system.
Weather shouldn't put too much of a damper on the full moon, though. According to the almanac, a little bit of rain can produce a rare phenomenon known as a "moonbow" — a rainbow created from moonlight that is refracted through water droplets in the air.
"Moonbows only happen when the full moon is fairly low in the sky, so look for one in the hours after sunset when the sky is dark," said the almanac.
Diana Leyva covers trending news and service journalism for The Tennessean. Contact her at Dleyva@gannett.com or follow her on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, at @_leyvadiana
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Why is the full moon red? Worm moon, lunar eclipse make for rare event
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'What a waste:' US scientists decry Trump's 47% cuts to NASA science budget
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Since January, when President Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House has been asking U.S. government organizations to implement some pretty radical changes. Things have been tense, to say the least. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off with little explanation, programs that improve diversity in the workplace have been eliminated, research grants have been cancelled in large sweeps, and international college students find themselves at risk of losing their legal status. One government organization that could be hit the hardest is NASA. The agency has faced a particularly extensive amount of pressure from the Trump administration: surveillance, goal restructuring, website purging and more. Other federal science organizations haven't been spared, either — places like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have been targeted as well. The ground of U.S. science seems to be quaking for political reasons rather than scientific ones, leaving scientists disheartened by their government and anxious about what's next. "I don't think it is an overstatement to say that morale among U.S.-based scientists is at an all-time low," Sarah Horst, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, told "People are afraid for their jobs, their students, the projects they've often spent decades working on, and they are afraid for the future of the United States." And things only got worse on May 30, when the Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 budget request for NASA came out. It proposes cutting the agency's science funding by 47%, and the agency's workforce by about one-third — from 17,391 to 11,853. This budget has to be officially passed by Congress to take effect, but if it indeed does, the effects could be brutal. "That would represent the smallest NASA workforce since mid-1960, before the first American had launched into space," Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit exploration and advocacy organization, told "If this budget is made real, I am most concerned about people," John O'Meara, chief scientist at the Keck Observatory, told "Missions deliver data and are essential, but the data is meaningless without the people there to interpret it, test theories and share discoveries with the world." Perhaps the most striking aspect of the White House's 2026 NASA budget proposal is the sheer amount of missions it would cancel altogether: 41 projects, as the Planetary Society said in a statement denouncing the report. "This is the extinction-level event we were warning people about," Dreier said. Some specifics: The sharply reduced budget would cancel the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, which was meant to bring samples of the Red Planet's surface to Earth — samples that NASA's Perseverance rover has been dutifully collecting over the last few years, and which scientists have long stressed must be analyzed in a lab to reach their full potential. MSR has experienced its own share of complications since its genesis, to be fair, including a huge price tag and what some believe is an overcomplicated mechanism of sample retrieval. However, cancelling the project outright instead of coming up with a solution would waste much of Perseverance's work on the Red Planet. The OSIRIS-APEX mission (you may remember it by its previous moniker, OSIRIS-REx) would also be cut off. This mission successfully sent a spacecraft on a multi-billion-mile expedition to an asteroid named Bennu, then had it grab a few pieces of the asteroid before traveling all the way back to Earth and safely dropping the samples to the ground. This same probe is now on round two, headed to examine the infamous asteroid Apophis — but if the FY26 NASA budget is confirmed, it won't complete its trip. "I'm personally mostly concerned for in-flight missions that already have a significant investment in both taxpayer dollars and peoples' lives/careers (including my own)," Kevin McGill, an employee at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the agency's lead center for robotic planetary exploration, told "Luckily, my work on [the Curiosity Mars rover] and Mars2020 [Perseverance] are mostly safe, but a lot of other stuff isn't." The budget also suggests ceasing operations for the Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft, which has been circling our solar system's gas giant since 2016 while regularly delivering rich information about the world and its moons. Juno is responsible for all those swirly blue images of Jupiter the astronomy community holds high; it took five years for this spacecraft to get to where it is, and many more for it to be built in the first place. "The operating missions cancellations alone represent over $12 billion of invested taxpayer value — and once they're gone, they're gone. It would take years and many millions more to replace them," Dreier said. NASA would also need to pull out of its collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the Rosalind Franklin rover — for the second time, no less — which is a robotic life-hunting explorer set to launch toward Mars in 2028. NASA had to pull out in 2012 because of budget cuts as well but re-entered the rover program after ESA cut ties with its other partner, the Russian space agency Roscosmos, once Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. "This makes the U.S. an untrustworthy partner and our allies hesitate the next time we ask them for help," Dreier said. Two operational Mars orbiters — Mars Odyssey and MAVEN — would be cancelled as well, as would the New Horizons spacecraft currently studying the outer reaches of the solar system and the DaVinci and VERITAS missions, which would explore Venus. The Lunar Gateway, which NASA envisioned as a sort of International Space Station around the moon, would also be cancelled. "What was surprising was the level of cuts within parts of each of the agencies. An example is astrophysics, where the cut was nearly 2/3 of the astrophysics budget," O'Meara said. According to the Planetary Society's analysis of the budget, that huge astrophysics reduction could mean eight spacecraft dedicated to studying extreme events in the universe (think, the Chandra X-ray Observatory) would be terminated. This analysis also suggests 10 missions constructed to study the region around Earth and the sun would be cancelled, as well as about a dozen Earth-specific missions that help scientists forecast natural disasters such as hurricanes and track global warming. The latter is especially concerning, given the speed with which Earth is heating up due to human activities that lead to greenhouse gas emissions — activities the Trump administration favors, such as burning coal for cheap power. Per the budget proposal, the White House also wants NASA to eliminate its "green aviation" spending, dedicated to making airplanes better for the environment, and instead work on "protecting the development of technologies with air traffic control and defense applications." It is also worth considering that other Trump-mandated moves have heavily impacted climate initiatives as well: more than 800 NOAA workers were laid off, for example, and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which houses climate change records dating back to the 1800s, was closed down — leading members of NASA's largest union to speak out in solidarity with their coworkers. Hundreds of scientists working on the National Climate Assessment, a huge report that details the dangers of climate change for policymakers to lean on, were also dismissed. (That represented all of the authors of this report). "This budget request, and its implications, has been highly disruptive to the entire field," O'Meara said. "We are forced to focus on 'what-if' planning that changes in scope rapidly. That takes the time away from what we do best: doing science and sharing it with the world." Furthermore, the White House's FY26 NASA budget proposal centers around a shift toward human missions to the Red Planet; this was a rare area that saw a budget boost in the President's request. For example, one slide in the budget summary says NASA should invest "more than $1 billion in new technology investments to enable a crewed mission to Mars." Another says the agency should allocate "$200M for Commercial Mars Payload Services (CMPS) to start launching robotic precursor missions to the Martian surface, and $80M to start deploying communications relay capabilities for Mars." "It just bothers me that they are changing almost the entirety of NASA's mission to this pipe dream of a human mission to Mars in any reasonable time frame and cost," McGill said. reached out to NASA for comment on the possible impact of these budget cuts, and was directed to acting administrator Janet Petro's statement in the proposal's Technical Supplement. This statement is supportive of the budget request overall, mentioning items such as a renewed push for human spaceflight to the moon and Mars. "The President's Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request for NASA reflects the Trump-Vance Administration's commitment to strengthening America's leadership in space exploration while exercising fiscal responsibility. With this budget, we aim to shape a Golden Age of innovation and exploration," it reads. This shift toward Mars crewed missions is perhaps predictable, given Trump's affiliation with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. (Former affiliation, maybe, given the heated feud currently unfolding on social media between the two.) Musk was a prominent backer of Trump's campaign and worked very closely with him over the past four months. For example, the SpaceX chief ran the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which was responsible for the bulk of government funding cuts in the name of saving "wasted taxpayer money." 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"I love JPL and its mission, but it's been a rough time as of late," he said. According to Dreier, there's good news and bad news concerning whether the budget proposal will go through. The good news is that, as he explains, there seems to be bipartisan dislike for the proposal. "We've heard directly from multiple congressional offices — Republican and Democrat — that this budget is 'dead on arrival,'" he said. Of note, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation released his legislative directives for Senate Republicans' budget reconciliation bill on Friday (June 6). The senator proposes dedicating $10 billion more to NASA's science programs — and, though most of it is indeed in line with the FY26 budget request's Mars endeavors, some of that funding would be used for other things, like NASA Space Launch System (SLS) rocket meant for moon exploration and Lunar Gateway. This united aversion to the budget proposal is unsurprising. The bipartisan U.S. Planetary Science Caucus, for instance, previously released a statement in response to early blueprints of the proposal that suggested the huge cuts we're seeing presented now. "We are extremely alarmed by reports of a preliminary White House budget that proposes cutting NASA Science funding by almost half and terminating dozens of programs already well underway, like the Mars Sample Return mission and the Roman Space Telescope," co-chairs Rep. Judy Chu (D-California) and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) wrote. Such agreement across the aisle makes sense when we consider how long it takes for space missions to reach fruition. Collaboration isn't just key — it's unavoidable. "Spaceflight, and human spaceflight in particular, requires hand-off from one administration to another," Dreier said. "The timelines are just too long for any one presidential administration." 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This Week In Space podcast: Episode 165 — Guardians of Space
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