THE MOON WAS HUMONGOUS

SuperMoon arrived at 1:32 AM over Honolulu.  How humongous was it?   Well, I couldn't tell the difference, although astronomers report that it was 12% larger and 30% brighter.  If you fell asleep or got clouded over, the slowly diminishing view can be seen tonight through Tuesday night.

What is a SuperMoon?  I can go into perigee, apogee and other astrophysical terms, but let me just say that the orbit of the Moon around our Earth is not a circle, but an ellipse (oval).  

So, a supermoon is merely the closest approach of these celestial bodies at full moon.  While there is a full moon every 27 days, this proximity only happens once per year.  Similarly, there is a time when the Moon is furthest away when full, and this happened in January (and will next occur this coming January):

The relative size difference is shown above.  It turns out that the Moon-Earth relationship is unique, for our Moon has the skinniest ellipse in our solar system of any other moon around its planet.   The next SuperMoon will occur in August of 2014.

Of course there is a SuperSun, sort of, every year, and the next one will occur in 12 days, 5July13.  

However, we are so far away in our swing around the Sun (called perihelion--the furthest is called aphelion) that the contrast is hardly worth your attention.  Plus, be careful about staring at the Sun.

Click here to see the supermoon next to recognizable structures around the world.  Just posted, watch Michelle Fowler of NASA summarizing the whole thing, and everything else you might have wanted to know about our Moon, including from where it came.

I spent much of the night and morning trying to keep out of the rain to view this SuperMoon, from sunset to SuperMoonset:

The above photos were taken with my new SONY Cybershot HX50V:  20.4 megapixels, clear image zoom 60x and optical zoom 30x.  It is unfortunately somewhat weighty, smaller than the NEX-5, but double the weight of my assortment of cigarette sized Cybershots.  I need to learn how to get clearer moonshots.

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There is a newly formed tropical depression in the East Pacific which looms to become a hurricane, but will fizzle before getting anywhere close to Hawaii:

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