Thursday 31 August 2023

Stunning Photos Capture the Last Blue Supermoon Until 2037

Those looking up at the sky on Wednesday, Aug. 30 witnessed a rare blue supermoon, which won't happen again until 2037. But if you missed the eye-popping celestial occurrence, the phenomenon was caught by no shortage of amateur and professional photographers.

According to NASA, the moon was expected to peak at precisely 9:36 p.m. ET, but will appear full for three days, from Tuesday night through Friday morning. As an additional treat, the ringed planet Saturn—just days from making its closest and brightest appearance of the year—also appeared near the moon, swinging clockwise around it as the evening progressed.

Whereas we typically only see one full moon per month, a blue moon occurs when two full moons happen in the same month. Because the the lunar cycle is 29.5 days, blue moons only happen about once every two to three years. 

A supermoon, on the other hand, is when the full moon phase of the lunar cycle is nearest to the Earth. Supermoons are a bit more common, occurring every three to four months. Due to of their proximity, supermoons also appear about 14 percent bigger than when the moon is farthest from Earth—or about the difference in size between a quarter and a nickel.

However, blue supermoons are much rarer, seen perhaps every decade or so. In this case, it will be almost 12 years before the next one is crops up.

Depending where you were in the world and what time you were looking for it, the blue supermoon took on anything from a deep orange-reddish hue to a pale grey, as you can see in additional photos and videos below.

In lieu of a visual, a BBC News presenter went viral for attempting to demonstrate what the blue supermoon looked like—using only her hands.

But while pretty to look at, this week's blue supermoon also coincided on the same day Hurricane Idalia made landfall. As a result of the moon being so close to Earth, the heightened gravitational pull also caused high tides to be intensified in places that were already seeing record flooding. As Idalia makes its way out to sea and the moon continues its cycle, however, it seems as though the worst is in the rearview.



from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/GBkDjwp
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