In less than two weeks, the moon will turn blood red for a short period and things may seem  a little weird, but they couldn’t be more normal. After all, we’ve seen this twice in just the last twelve months.

And yet there’s long been anxiety over total lunar eclipses, also referred to as ‘blood moons’ for the reddish hue that the shadow of the Earth casts on the full moon during the not-really-that-rare event (it happens about every one to three years on average). Often thought of as a bad omen by various prognosticators of assorted religious, conspiratorial and otherwise paranoid stripes, it’s sometimes claimed that a lunar eclipse can “trigger” natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

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