Supermoon: Biggest, brightest moon of year to come Saturday
Published May 04, 2012
Associated Press
The biggest and brightest full moon of the year arrives Saturday night as our celestial neighbor passes closer to Earth than usual.
But don't expect any "must-have-been-a-full-moon" spike in crime or crazy behavior. That's just folklore.
Saturday's event is a "supermoon," the closest and therefore the biggest and brightest full moon of the year. At 11:34 p.m., the moon will be about 221,802 miles from Earth. That's about 15,300 miles closer than average.
That proximity will make the moon appear about 14 percent bigger than it would if the moon were at its farthest distance, said Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory. The difference in appearance is so small that "you'd be very hard-pressed to detect that with the unaided eye," he said.
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