Luna-lovers and stargazers will have a feast on the East coast tonight, as the first supermoon in 11 months will occur just before midnight.
A supermoon is a colloquial term for when the Moon reaches perigee, the closest point to Earth during it’s orbital rotation. This makes the Moon noticeably larger, and appears larger still when close to the horizon, which it will be at 11:48 p.m. EDT tonight, (4.48 a.m. BST Oct 7th, for the Brits).
As well as being a supermoon, it will also be classed as a Harvest Moon. This is given to the last full moon before the autumn equinox, the light from which was traditionally used to harvest crops by pre-modern farmers.
They would reap and pick long into the night with the Moon’s bright light helping them see. Alternatively, if the full Moon appears after the autumn equinox, it’s known as the Hunter’s Moon, as that same light would allow hunters to shoot by.
But wait, didn’t the equinox happen already? Yes indeed, however according to various sources, every few years, since the lunar months and solar year don’t correspond perfectly, a Harvest Moon will appear in October, as is the case this year.
In a bit of trivia, this will be the latest in the year that a Harvest Moon has appeared since 1987. In a further piece of trivia, the supermoon appears larger to us close to the horizon than when it’s high in the sky. This is known as the “Moon Illusion”
“Photographs prove that the Moon is the same width near the horizon as when it’s high in the sky, but that’s not what we perceive with our eyes,” NASA noted in a blog post.
“Thus it’s an illusion rooted in the way our brains process visual information. Even though we’ve been observing it for thousands of years, there’s still not a satisfying scientific explanation for exactly why we see it.”
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