Midwinter’s round moon rose out of the eastern sky Friday, Jan. 17, around 8 p.m. Tammy Davis, of Appleton, caught its ascent through the clouds with her camera. “There were many changes happening around the moon that night,” she wrote. “It was beautiful and amazing.”

This January moon, the Wolf Moon, took many by surprise as it lifted through the clouds. At the Samoset Resort, those outside at the ice bar watched the moon as it slowly climbed over Penobscot Bay, at first as orange as a warm July moon.

According to Space.com, the January moon is called the wolf moon because wolf packs would howl “hungrily outside Indian villages. It was also known as the Old Moon or the Moon after Yule.  In some tribes this was the Full Snow Moon; most applied that name to the next moon. Since the moon arrives at apogee — its farthest point from Earth — less than three hours earlier, this will also be the smallest full moon of 2014. In terms of apparent size, it will appear 12.2-percent smaller than the full moon of Aug.10, the biggest full moon of the year.”

Some tribes also called the January moon the Snow Moon.

Here is a little bit of information about the moon, courtesy of NASA:

“The light areas of the moon are known as the highlands. The dark features, called maria (Latin for seas), are impact basins that were filled with lava between 4.2 and 1.2 billion years ago. These light and dark areas represent rocks of different composition and ages, which provide evidence for how the early crust may have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean. The craters themselves, which have been preserved for billions of years, provide an impact history for the moon and other bodies in the inner solar system.

“The leading theory of the moon's origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth approximately 4.5 billion years ago, and the resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite. The newly formed moon was in a molten state. Within about 100 million years, most of the global "magma ocean" had crystallized, with less-dense rocks floating upward and eventually forming the lunar crust. The early moon may have developed an internal dynamo, the mechanism for global magnetic fields for terrestrial planets.

“Since the ancient time of volcanism, the arid, lifeless moon has remained nearly unchanged. With too sparse an atmosphere to impede impacts, a steady rain of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets strikes the surface. Over billions of years, the surface has been ground up into fragments ranging from huge boulders to powder. Nearly the entire moon is covered by a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust and rocky debris called the lunar regolith. Beneath is a region of fractured bedrock referred to as the megaregolith....

“Earth's only natural satellite is simply called the moon because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. Other moons in our solar system are given names so they won't be confused with each other. We call them moons because, like our own, they are natural satellites orbiting a solar system body (which in turn is orbiting a star).”