Stargazers in the UK who missed last month’s supermoon will have another chance to catch a glimpse of a bigger and brighter supermoon tonight.
‘The best time to view this supermoon will be any time during the night of the 13th July, when the moon will rise in the east just after sunset, and set in the west a little before sunrise,’ said Anna Ross, a planetarium astronomer at Royal Museums Greenwich, in south-east London.
‘There is no particular location you need to be to observe this event as this is a bright full moon. As long as the night is clear of clouds it will be easy to spot whether you are in a light-polluted city or a dark area of countryside,’
July’s full moon is also known as the Buck Moon because male deer shed and regrow their antlers around this time of year.
The name comes from a Native American system which uses the different months’ full moons as a calendar to keep track of the seasons.
A supermoon is the result of a full moon occurring when it is near its closest point to the Earth in its orbit. This happens because the moon orbits the Earth on an elliptical path, rather than a circular one.
Tonight’s Buck Moon will be the biggest and brightest supermoon of the year as it represents the moon arriving at its closest point to the Earth for 2022.
‘The apparent difference between the size of the full moon at its closest and farthest points is only around 14% and, although if you were on the moon its brightness wouldn’t change, being that bit closer, it also overall appears to be around 30% brighter to us here on Earth,’ explained Ross.
‘The average distance of the moon from the Earth is 384,400km, but the Moon will reach its closest point this lunar month on the 13th July at 09:08, when it will be 357,264 km away,’
‘On Wednesday, the moonrise time from London is 9.48 pm, it is 10.35 pm in Edinburgh and 9.24 pm in Plymouth,’ said Dr Robert Massey, deputy executive director of The Royal Astronomical Society.
To get a good view of tonight’s moon, Dr Massey advised that you need a perfect horizon, so you’d need to be looking out over ‘a very flat landscape or the sea’.
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