Super Moon of March 2011
WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY – ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY
This is a photograph of the March 2011 Super Moon. It was taken with a Nikon D90 body and a Phoenix mirror lens set at 650mm. This photo was hand held captured.
A perigee-syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system or “supermoon” is a full or new moon that coincides with a close approach by the Moon to the Earth. The Moon’s distance varies each month between approximately 357,000 kilometers (222,000 mi) and 406,000 km (252,000 mi) due to its elliptical orbit around the Earth (distances given are center-to-center).
The term supermoon is not widely accepted or used within the astronomy or scientific community, who prefer the term perigee-syzygy. Perigee is the point at which the Moon is closest in its orbit to the Earth, and syzygy is a full or new moon, when the Earth, the Moon and the Sun are aligned. Hence, a supermoon can be regarded as a combination of the two, although they do not perfectly coincide each time. Syzygy may occur within a maximum of 12 hours from perigee during a supermoon, and 1 hour from perigee during an extreme supermoon.
The size and brightness of an object follows an inverse-square law, which means that a full moon at perigee is 12% larger and brighter than an average full moon. However, because the offset of the moon’s orbit versus its phases is only two days, this change in appearance is gradual from month to month and therefore is not usually noticeable to a casual observer.