Is the super moon making us crazy?

When Googling "total lunar eclipse", the rare cosmic event that happened last night, the search engine's prompt function automatically offers the suggestion: "Total lunar eclipse emotions".

The results attempt to provide answers to the personal anecdotes floating around this week about the moon's effect on our mental health, news.com.au reported.

In the lead up to the lunar trifecta phenomenon, dubbed the "super red blue moon" or "super blue blood moon", social media lit up with people claiming they'd been feeling out of sorts and overly emotional.

Children, including babies, and pets, are said to be acutely affected by the moon.

After all, the words "lunar" and "lunacy are derived from the Latin "lunaticus", meaning "of the moon" or "moonstruck".

Ask any credible scientist or medical professional and they will tell you there is absolutely zero scientific evidence that the moon can impact our emotions and mood.

But most are also armed with plenty of anecdotes about people acting strangely, feeling more depressed and even a spike in crime rates.

"One survey in the USA found that about 40 per cent of the general population, and 80 per cent of mental health professionals, believe that the phase of the moon affects human behaviour," scientist Dr Karl Kruszelnicki wrote for the ABC.

"And yet, 99 per cent of the evidence says that the moon has no effect on human behaviour."

Therese March is a former senior constable with NSW Police who said she would prepare herself for a busy, eventful night shift when she worked during a full moon.

"Our busiest time on the job would always be after dark when it was a full moon and they'd always be unusual jobs or people doing stupid things. They'd never be ordinary," Ms March told news.com.au.

"We'd get weird noise complaints. I remember one man using his power drill in his garage in the middle of the night. We said 'Of course it happened on a full moon'.

"It was just odd behaviour ... stupid complaints and unusual complaints. They all seemed irrelevant at the time but they were always during full moons."

But astronomer Professor Alan Duffy says people are often looking for a logical solution to illogical emotions.

"It's confirmation bias ­– when the full moon is up we are looking for strange behaviour or remember that we saw strange behaviour," he told nine.com.au.

"I'm sad to say there's as much strange behaviour on any given night as there is on a full moon."