# Super Moon tonight



## Lawrence (Mar 11, 2003)

Who's going to stay up and take pictures?
May need a tripod and set your camera to a long exposure to get the best shot.


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## mrjimmy (Nov 8, 2003)

Lawrence said:


> Who's going to stay up and take pictures?
> May need a tripod and set your camera to a long exposure to get the best shot.


If it's clear, I will be going to the spit sans camera to enjoy the experience. I find sometimes the camera distracts from that.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Gonna go for late night mcycle ride if my cold permits. Love riding with a big full moon.


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## mrjimmy (Nov 8, 2003)

MacDoc said:


> Gonna go for late night mcycle ride if my cold permits. Love riding with a big full moon.


That sounds excellent.


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## G-Mo (Sep 26, 2007)

Lawrence said:


> Who's going to stay up and take pictures?
> May need a tripod and set your camera to a long exposure to get the best shot.


If you get some good pictures, post them please. We have a 21-month old, haven't seen 11pm (the optimal viewing time) for a while with regular 4:30AM mornings!!?


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Hmmmm - 4 degrees - that's a tad daunting after 3 months in the tropics and still nursing a cold.
But absolutely perfect sky - clear cold wind from the north....

Maybe take new camera and the van up to the flying field and take some shots. Hmm moon rise at 8.16 - should be spectacular around 9 pm with the moon just over the horizon.

Someone should get some shots with the CN tower.


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## G-Mo (Sep 26, 2007)

I'm hearing conflicting reports regarding 9:34 and 11:35PM.



> "The perigee and the full moon occur within a minute of each other Saturday night (at about 11:35 p.m. ET), and the moon will seem as much as 14 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter than other full moons this year, NASA says."


CBC.ca



> This cycle’s perigee, at 9:34 p.m. on Saturday, will be the closest of the year.


National Post

What seems to be consistent, is that this super moon, as super moons over the last decade go, is going to be pretty pedestrian.



> McCurdy isn’t all that impressed.
> 
> “It’s not actually very extraordinary,” he says. “As the so-called super moons go, this one is pretty garden variety.”


National Post

I'll look out the window at 9:34PM just in case!


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## SINC (Feb 16, 2001)

Sadly, it is cloudy here and we will miss the event.


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## eMacMan (Nov 27, 2006)

SINC said:


> Sadly, it is cloudy here and we will miss the event.


Ditto further south, though there is a chance of the moon peaking through.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Damn is it EVER bright - rarely have I ever been able to see colour in moonlight.
The camera gets it better than my eyes but even to human eyes the pink is easily visible.
Had to balance it on the window sill :yikes: to get the slow shot - 8 seconds.

Did not know it would be 30% brighter than a standard full moon. Few tries finally got a shot. I'd say looking out the window at the tree it's only a bit less lit than this.










There was no lights on in my house or the neighbors. Some detail. Bit too chilly to truck out and get a reflective light shot instead of transmitted.


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## Lawrence (Mar 11, 2003)

I expected to see a huge "Harvest type moon"
I didn't bother trying to shoot the moon this time.

Hopefully later this summer, I'll get some big moon opportunities.


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## yeeeha (Feb 16, 2007)

G-Mo said:


> I'm hearing conflicting reports regarding 9:34 and 11:35PM.


The discussion about when the closest Full Moon of 2012 occurs is moot at this time. But here's the info: the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) in Washington D.C. publishes the annual Astronomical Almanac jointly with Her Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office in the U.K. The Almanac contains fundamental astronomical data, and is a reference that most research observatories use. USNO is also the timekeeper of a master atomic clock.

According to USNO, the closest Full Moon of 2012 happened on May 6 at 03:36 Universal Time (UT). Universal Time is very close to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The two timescales are often treated as the same in everyday use. For a technical discussion of the two timescales, see here.

May 6 03:36 UT equals to May 5 11:36pm EDT / 8:36pm PDT.

National Post quoted a time of 9:34pm. The paper interviewed this fellow Bruce McCurdy. Do a Google search and you will find that this guy is in Edmonton. So the paper quoted the time zone in Alberta.

I do not like the term "supermoon". What so super about this past Full Moon other than being the closest one in the year? What about the Full Moon that is the furthest on Nov. 28? That's "super" too in a way; super far?? It doesn't help that NASA actually uses the term "supermoon" in its article.

Here's an interesting piece of info: since the past Full Moon is the closest this year, half an orbit later on May 19 the Moon will be at its furthest point along its current orbit around the Earth. And that would also be the furthest the Moon will be from Earth in 2012. The lunar phase will be one day before a New Moon on May 19. 

The next day May 20, the Moon will be New and cross directly in front of the Sun. Since the Moon is a day after reaching its furthest distance from Earth this year, the New Moon will be a little too far away to completely block the disk of the Sun as seen from Earth. So we have a somewhat rare annular solar eclipse. That means there is a ring of light surrounding the black disk of the New Moon. The annular solar eclipse is only visible along a narrow strip of area. Outside the strip the eclipse is partial of various magnitudes. Areas west of Ontario can see the partial eclipse in its entirety.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Thanks - appreciated.

••••



> I expected to see a huge "Harvest type moon"



The moons "huge" as it crests the horizon but that is an optical illusion. When it's closest to earth it is 16% larger than average distance away but a whopping 30% brighter which was very very obvious that night where I was with a perfectly clear sky.

I've been able to read by moonlight before but never have seen colours in moonlight which is normally not bright enough fro the color rods to work in your eye.
Not so the other night. Colours were obvious. What the camera showed was just a bit more intense than what was visible to the eye.


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## yeeeha (Feb 16, 2007)

MacDoc said:


> When it's closest to earth it is 16% larger than average distance away but a whopping 30% brighter which was very very obvious that night where I was with a perfectly clear sky.


The size difference is not noticeable visually. You would need to take a picture of the closest Full Moon, then another one of a different Full Moon and put the two images side by side in order to see the size difference.

For brightness, it is noticeable not from looking directly at the Full Moon but from what the closest Full Moon illuminates; just like what you said about seeing colours in moonlight.


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## yeeeha (Feb 16, 2007)

*2012 closest Full Moon rise from Toronto*

Here are a few pix that I took from the south shore of Ward's Island looking southeast toward Leslie Spit. Ward's Island is one of the islands of the chain that make up Toronto Island. Leslie Spit is an operational landfill site that the city has been naturalizing all along. The Spit juts away from the Toronto shoreline about 10km. At the furthest point of the Spit is a lighthouse that is still in use.

I was hoping to get a shot of the rising Full Moon behind the lighthouse. Distant clouds over southeastern New York state killed the opportunity. In any case even if I had a clear sky along the horizon, I would have missed the shot because I wasn't standing at the correct place. I had the azimuth of the moonrise from the software Starry Night Pro, then used Google Earth to approximately determine where I would have to set up my gears. Either software or both of them don't have enough precision for this kind of shot. I will have to try again with another Full Moon.

For the first pix I waited long enough for most of the Moon to clear the cloud deck, but almost missed it in the field of view at 300mm.

Then I zoomed out a bit to 195mm to get a whole bunch of shots.

After taking 27 pix, the rising Full Moon became too bright to continue shooting. With a proper exposure to show features on the lunar disk, everything else became black. So I packed up my gears.

Then I saw a pair of mallards that remained standing on the stonewall along the broadwalk. They had been standing there since I set up my gears. I went over quietly and quickly took a few shots. I couldn't really set up the tripod again. Any large movement that I made would surely chase away the ducks. So I had to shoot with the widest aperture and turned on the vibration reduction motor on the lens to minimize shaking. The male mallard is on the right side.


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## SoyMac (Apr 16, 2005)

yeeeha said:


> Here are a few pix that I took from the south shore of Ward's Island ...


yeeeha, I really like these!


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## spiffychristian (Mar 17, 2008)

I too expected a huge harvest moon. I was unimpressed with what I saw so I forgot about it.


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