Or, don’t – I’m about to show you why not.
So, once again the media is hyping a ‘supermoon’ for the full moon going on right now, which means a full moon very near the moon’s closest approach to the earth, or perigee. “The biggest and brightest moon for all of 2025!” or even longer periods, and such articles pop up all the time. We have a very clear night out there right now, and the moon is indeed bright.
Of course, I could mess with the exposure and make it look far brighter, or far dimmer, so this means nothing. And while this is at 600mm, it’s also cropped quite a bit from the original, which looked this big in the frame:
But, you ask, how does it compare to a regular moon, or perhaps the farthest and smallest moon in the sky? And I’m prepared for that one, since I overlaid another exposure, same focal length, but very close to the moon at apogee, the farthest from earth, so we can see the overwhelming and drastic change in size for this magnificent event:
That’s it – that’s very close to the biggest difference in sizes possible from the moon in the sky. Specifically, it’s tonight’s moon at a distance of roughly 351,500 km, versus the full moon of March 24/25th, 2024, at a distance of 400,900 km. The orbit is elliptical, but not that elliptical.
[This was a mere two weeks before the total solar eclipse of that year, by the way, which always happens during new moon.]
It gets a lot worse when we see the approximate size that it appears to our eyes, like this – it’s as close as I can get since everyone’s monitor resolution is different, and some people even view websites on their smutphones, believe it or not. Seriously. But if you want accuracy, back off from the any of these images until you can just cover the moons with the tip of your pinky held at arm’s length. Then you can compare the drastic difference in size between a ‘supermoon’ and a ‘patheticmoon’ or whatever you want to call it.
Now, while out there tonight, I did do several exposures by the light of this supermoon, as well as chasing a few other subjects, but they’ll be along in a separate post. I wanted to get this one up in a timely manner to save you the huge disappointment in discovering that the media is hyping something all out of proportion.