“A full Moon of rare size and beauty“—it’s happening tomorrow!
Please note:
The best time to look is when the Moon is near the horizon. That is when illusion mixes with reality to produce a truly stunning view. For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, low-hanging Moons look unnaturally large when they beam through trees, buildings and other foreground objects.
This is apparently known as “the Moon illusion.” (I’m no moonologist nor head-shrinker, but does it not make completely logical sense that a near-the-horizon moon just looks bigger because it’s not floating all lonely way up in the big, dark sky? And that at a giant moon with a tree in front of it, for, you know, scale, is going to look gianter? Anyway…) The sunset in Seattle tomorrow happens at 6 7:20 p.m., so get yourself to a place with an eastern view (including a tree) and a bottle of wine and someone you like. (Hopefully it will not be cloudy.)
Thank you, Sir Cornichon!
Everyone knows this is when the Mooninites slide down their gossamer ropes to land on top of the mountains.
It looks bigger because they use the Giant Hand Winch to pull it closer to the mountaintops and save on fuel.
The answer to that question is unfortunately complex
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/3d/moonill…
Our brain purposely focuses on visual information about the horizon over the view overhead because it’s more important info for a human getting around on the Earth’s surface. This is the same reason that all our local mountains look bigger subjectively than they do in photos…
Speaking of celestial objects on the horizon, look for Mercury in the west for a short time just after sunset. NASA just gave Mercury an artificial moon yesterday, slotting Messenger, the first-ever orbiter into Mercurian orbit at 6:10PM last night:
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/index.php
but is the NASA satellite visible, Peter?
@5, not unless you have Superman-style telescopic vision, but Messenger can see us:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a…
The sun doesn’t set until 7:20pm tomorrow (hooray for daylight savings time!) but maybe you mean moonrise? That’s at 7:57pm.
Does that mean we might get an orange or red moon?
Moonologist! God you are cute.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badast…
” * Yes, the Moon is closer today than usual, but only by less than 2%.
* This does happen around full Moon, which is when we get bigger tides, but that happens every single month. The Moon being closer amplifies that, but only a tiny little bit.
* The Moon’s possible effect on earthquakes has been studied for a long time. The result? Major earthquakes are not correlated with the Moon’s position or distance.
Therefore,
* Anyone claiming this “supermoon” can cause earthquakes or whatnot is, to be blunt, totally, completely, utterly, wrong.”
I always liked the explanation that when the moon is near the horizon, the light is travelling further through the atmosphere to your eyeballs, and the curvature of the atmosphere acts on the light like a lens, enlarging the image.
That might be completely wrong, of course, but it’s a hell of a logical-sounding explanation.
@11, the longer cross section of atmosphere at the horizon thing explains why the moon and sun appear orange/red on the horizon. Blue light – shorter wavelength. Red light – longer wavelength.
@2, thanks for posting! That was very interesting.
o supermoon, o judge, o mom and dad
Try watching a full moon rise from the calm water Gulf of California on a 100+ degree black August evening under a grass roofed open air San Pedro cabana. The moon rises to become its normal size bigger than ever.