The full moon is looking bigger and brighter this week than it’s looked since 1948 – and although you may not notice just how much more super this “supermoon” is, it’s definitely worth looking up. If the skies are ever clear, that is.
The moon is due to be at its closest at 3:22 a.m. PT Nov. 14, and it’ll reach the peak of its full phase a few hours later at 5:52 a.m. The bottom line is that the lunar disk will look about 14 percent wider than it does at its farthest distance from Earth, and shine about 30 percent brighter.
This doesn’t mean you’d have to get up in the wee hours to catch a super view.
“I’ve been telling people to go out at night on either Sunday or Monday night to see the supermoon,” Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, said in a NASA feature about the phenomenon. “The difference in distance from one night to the next will be very subtle, so if it’s cloudy on Sunday, go out on Monday.”
