Caoimhín's Content

Today, for a change, we are going to be talking about something that is happening today, on the date of this publication, really something from yesterday, the 19th of August. However, there is no need to worry if you’re getting to this piece a day or two late. In fact this piece is specifically about why you don’t need to be too excited about the Super Blue Moon that is rising just next to Saturn.

Of course that sounds pretty impressive, a Super Blue Moon, not just Super, not just Blue, but both at the same time. Firstly, we need to review a Super Moon. The Moon of course is orbiting the Earth in an ellipse and if you’ve seen some of my previous pieces then you’ve heard about supermoons and micromoons, and perhaps a little bit about how they relate to total solar eclipses and annular solar eclipses. Taking a close look at the Moon, today on the 20th it is only 98.1% full, a little bit past its fullest. Going back to yesterday, the 19th, the Moon was 99.8 % full. That’s really not to bad, it is only a little shy of 100%. On Monday the 19th, the Moon rose just 360,000 kilometers away from us, instead of it’s furthest distance of 400,000 kilometers away from us. That’s the most distant we’ll get to see a FullMoon and that is when it is a Micromoon, when it is far away and full. When the Moon is closer to us when it’s full, that’s when it’s a Supermoon and 360,000 kilometers is certainly much closer than 400,000 kilometers.

However, the Moon can still get closer. Calling the 99.8% full moon a Full Moon isn’t too much of an issue, it is the fullest we will get to see from Ireland in August. We don’t always get to see the Moon at exactly 100% full, and even if we did it would only make a rather subtle difference. Continuing to move forward in time, we can see that the Moon will be getting closer to us. the distance from us to the Moon drops to just about 358,000 kilometers away while it’s still there at 99.8% full. taking a closer look at a Supermoon, it can still be pretty hard to tell that it is 10-15% larger looking, about 30% brighter looking, than the Micromoon we saw a few months ago. These things can be tough to notice with just the naked eye and your memory, but if you are taking photographs with a camera you can compare them. You will need to make sure that you get the zoom and the exposure and everything the same, identical photos under identical conditions will show a difference in the Moon. Looking at the morning of the 20th, after midnight on the 19th, the Moon is 99.8% full and 358,000 kilometers away from us. The Moon should still look great, it would look very full, we will only get a tiny little bit of a shadow the side but it’s not too noticeable. Taking a look at early morning on the the 21st, after midnight on the 20th, the Moon is only 356,000 kilometers away, so the Moon is still getting closer to us. This does not necessarily mean that the next Moon will be more Super, the Moon could be getting closer to us in such a way as that its closest point is going to drift further away from the point when we’d see it at it’s most full, that is possible.

Thankfully, it’s not the case this time. We’re going to have to push forward a whole month into the future here, into September, up to the very next Full Moon. Looking at that Full Moon, we’re seeing it 100% full here in Ireland. If we’re seeing it perfectly full in Ireland, the same should be visible from a reasonable portion of Europe, England, a lot of the Iberian Peninsula, France, Germany, we’re all going to be able to see the Moon at 100% full, not 99.8%, 100%. This is also true for large stretches, potentially most, of Africa. With this moon being just 353,996 kilometers away, it’s even closer than the Full Moon in August. Given the number we have, it makes sense to round it up to 354,000 kilometers away from us, a full 2000 kilometers closer. The Supermoon we’re getting next month is more Super, it is closer to us. Some of you who’ve been keeping up with my channel may remember the Micromoon that we had earlier in the year. From that Micromoon I went forward and based on the numbers I was seeing and the numbers we’re seeing here, the Supermoon was not in August. Now of course there are differing definitions to the Supermoon, what counts as a Supermoon and what does not,

Some of these definitions allow a range. As long as the Moon is within 10% or 20% of its hypothetical closest approach to the Earth, when it is also within a couple of degrees of being full, it may be counted as a Supermoon. The Full Moon for August, at 99.8% full, it’s only 0.2% away from being full and it will be full for another part of the Earth a little bit later or earlier in a 24-hour period. We won’t get to see it here in Ireland, but potentially for the Pacific on the nights of the 19th and 20th, it might be visible at 100% full. I’m not sure exactly where on Earth the Moon will look 100% full for this cycle, I just know it’s not Ireland, and I know that it is 358,000 kilometers away from us, which is not the closest it can get. It is still 40,000 kilometers closer to us than it could be at its furthest, but it hasn’t been that far away and full since closer to the start of the year.

Looking at the Moon early in the morning of the 18th of September it will be a little closer to us, though the difference is subtle. However, that is what this piece is all about, the subtle differences between the Moon when it’s almost a Supermoon and when it’s actually a Supermoon. Of course the differences are definitional. The Moon will still be 100% full just before sunrise, if you want to get up that early in the morning, but it will still be 100% full just a little after midnight after the 17th. Unfortunately if you go out on the 17th of September before midnight then you will only see the Moon at 99.9% full. All you need to do is wait, an hour or couple of minutes until we cross over past midnight, and the moon will reach 100% full. This lets us see how quickly this can change as well, a percentage point can change the course of the night. The Moon will be at 353,955 kilometers away, and that number is still going down.

As I mentioned, the Moon’s closest point can move away fromt eh point when it is fullest. If the Moon is at it’s closest during a solar eclipse then we will get an annular solar eclipse instead of a total one. However, as the Moon could still get closer to us than what we’re seeing in Spetmeber, we will have to go and look at October to see if it gets closer still. We will probably only need to go to 15th or 16th, maybe the 17th of October, as the date of the Full Moon will change from month to month. The October Full Moon will only appear 99.7% full to us here in Ireland, but it will be just over 352,000 kilometers away. This that means that the Supermoon that we’re going to see in October will be more Super than the Supermoon we’re going to see in September, which will be more Super than the Supermoon you could have seen in August. Not only that, although from here in Ireland it’s only 99.7% in October and it will have been, by the time this video goes up, 99.8% full for us in Ireland in August, but in September, it’s 100% full for us here in Ireland,

The Moon appears brighter when it’s closer to us, a Supermoon is about 30% brighter than a Micromoon, which makes the Supermoon roughly 15% brighter than the average Moon. This would be assuming each Moon is equally full, likely at 100%. As soon as you start taking percentage points off that fullness, we’re receiving less reflected light from the Moon. I do not know for sure if a Moon that is 2% less full is exactly 2% less bright, but it is definitely a little less bright the further you are away from that 100% Full Super Moon. I have not done the maths, and I do not intend to do the maths myself, but if anyone reader would like to figure it out you can. Things like brightness do follow set formulas, and calculating reflected light for a given area based on incidence of light and albedo of the surface is possible, as long as you plug the right numbers into the right parts of the equation and solve it correctly, it just takes some time.

Despite not being the most Super Supermoon coming up, there is something special about the Full Moon that we are seeing in August. Even though the Full Supermoon in September will be closer to us and more full for us here in Ireland, and the October Supermoon will be even more Super again, by another, thousand kilometers or so. This distance is significant, especially if you have to walk it. The over all difference between the August “supermoon” and the October Supermoon is about 4000 kilometers, which would be quite a trek, but in terms of our distance to the Moon, it’s still only a tiny fraction of the overall variation of nearly 50,000 kilometers either direction.

That should hopefully cover the Super part, though I do have other posts on this website talking more about the Moon at its closest and furthest. The Moon we are seeing on the 20th of August or the night of the 19th, is a Blue Moon. There is a difference between a lunar month and a calendar month. The actual lunar cycle is 29.5 days, not 30, and that means that sometimes we’ll get two full Moons in one month. With three month in a season, that means we sometimes get 4 Full Moons in one season instead of the expected three. This only happens because of where we put the seasons, and the fact that the months are 30 or 31 days, or 28-sometimes-29 days for February. As the months don’t line up with the lunar cycle we get an extra Moon sometimes and we call that Moon Blue, despite the fact there is no difference in colour. I always called the second Moon of a calendar month the Blue Moon, but another definition is the fourth Full Moon of a season or the third Full Moon in a season that will have four by the end. The August Blue Moon will not look better than any other Full Moon that’s 99.8% and 358,000 kilometers away from us. What will look better is a Moon that’s 100% full and only 353 or 352,000 kilometers away from us, and even then, the difference is marginal. I absolutely think you should go outside and take a look at the Super Full Blue Moon, as long as you remember that the Moon will be both more Super and more full in the coming months, and the only reason it’s blue is because of our calendar. We won’t get another Super Full Blue Moon until, apparently, 2037, again I haven’t checked the maths because all it would take to change that is an extra leap day or some other change in the calendar, and our calendar, which we humans have made, is something that we have changed before,

How far away the Moon is, that’s going to be a lot harder for anybody to change, so I hope you enjoyed this piece regarding the distance of the Moon. I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about the Super Full Moon and its Blueness and its Superness and its Fullness and how that’s going to change over the coming months. If you did enjoy this article, you can support the creation of more content by subscribing to this website and my YouTube channel. Hopefully, I’ll see you back here next time.