If you didn’t know there was going to be a super moon tonight, you must not have social media, TV or email. It seems like everywhere I’ve gone, I read about the fact this full moon would be closer to earth than most, making it a super moon. I charged the camera battery, grabbed my tri-pod and checked the facts with NASA and found this on their website:
Mark your calendar. On March 19th, a full Moon of rare size and beauty will rise in the east at sunset. It’s a super “perigee moon”–the biggest in almost 20 years.
“The last full Moon so big and close to Earth occurred in March of 1993,” says Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory in
Washington DC. “I’d say it’s worth a look.”
Full Moons vary in size because of the oval shape of the Moon’s orbit. It is an ellipse with one side (perigee) about 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other (apogee): diagram. Nearby perigee moons are about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser moons that occur on the apogee side of the Moon’s orbit.
“The full Moon of March 19th occurs less than one hour away from perigee–a near-perfect coincidence1that happens only 18 years or so,” adds Chester.
A perigee full Moon brings with it extra-high “perigean tides,” but this is nothing to worry about, according to NOAA. In most places, lunar gravity at perigee pulls tide waters only a few centimeters (an inch or so) higher than usual. Local geography can amplify the effect to about 15 centimeters (six inches)–not exactly a great flood.
So I’m thinking mostly what we had was something to look at and figure out whether we know how to use our cameras! Just the same, with clouds floating through the Memphis sky all evening, I found it fun to stand outside for a while taking some shots. There are way more than there probably should be but I had fun watching how the cloud movements looked at different zoom lengths.
I love how the clouds give a mystical feeling to the sky.
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