So, tonight is the so-called Supermoon,
when the Moon happens to be full at the same time it’s at perigee, the
point in its orbit closest to the Earth. This makes it somewhat larger
and brighter than normal, and that’s getting a lot of attention in the
press. I pointed out a few days ago that in reality, you almost
certainly won’t notice the difference between this full Moon and any
other, mostly because the difference is small, and our eyes and brain
are terrible at judging things like that without something to directly
compare it to.
I was thinking about this last night as I watched the almost-full
Moon rise in the east (which, I’ll add, ironically looked huge due to the Moon Illusion!), and thought of something that might help illustrate this last point.
Read the full article at Discover Magazine.
How Far Away is the Moon? (The Scale of the Universe)
No comments:
Post a Comment