Moon appears bigger and brighter

PARIS: A super-full and extra-bright moon dazzled the night skies this weekend as the lunar body swept along the low point of its elliptical orbit around the Earth.

The so-called lunar perigee brings the moon about 50,000 km closer to the Earth than when it's at the farthest point of its oval orbit. That proximity made the moon appear about 14 percent bigger than it would if the moon were at its farthest distance, said Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory. The difference in appearance is so small that “you'd be very hardpressed to detect that with the unaided eye,” he said. The moon's distance from Earth varies because it follows an elliptical orbit rather than a circular one. When a full moon coincides with this low point, as it did overnight from Saturday to yesterday, it appears especially bright and large, with observers often able to make out craters and other lunar features in clearer detail than normal. NASA said the perigee full moon appeared about 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than other full moons in 2012.

Super-full perigee moons occur about once a year on average. The last supermoon, on March 19, 2011, was about 240 miles closer than this year’s will be.

Next year's will be a bit farther away than this year’s. The supermoon normally brings unusually high tides because of its closeness and its alignment with the sun and Earth, but the effect will be modest, Chester said.