I found
this webpage while looking at some lateral thinking puzzles. It says:
Quote:
What happened in February 1866 that will not happen again for another two and a half million years?
There was no full moon. January and March of that year each had two full moons — a most unusual occurrence.
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Sky Map shows full moons at 20:29 (UT) Jan. 30, and 11:52 Mar. 1, 1866, so that checks out. But the Metonic Cycle (225 lunar months, which is almost exactly 19 years) should give us another February without a full moon, and yep Sky Map says 16:19 Jan. 30, and 04:00 Mar. 1, 1885 were full moons. Perhaps the question meant EST, or similar. Still, just the law of averages should have it more often than 2 1/2 million years. And now that I think about it, SeanF and I talked about Feb. 1999
here, full moons at 16:07 Jan. 31, and 06:59 Mar. 2, 1999.
Is this a misstatement of some other puzzle?
PS: Nevermind, I found that it was taken from one of Paul Sloane's books, and it appears on his
errors page.