Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Perigee-Syzygy

Now there's a Scrabble word for ya, but you'll never have enough "y's".
*sigh*

That's what a super moon is, and it's not actually rare.
The thing is, the moon's orbit around the earth is not a circle; it's an ellipse.
Therefore sometimes the moon is closer (perigee) and sometimes it's further (apogee) from earth.
Syzygy has to do with the alignment of the sun, moon, and earth.
When they're all in a line (at every full moon) that's syzygy.

So a perigee-syzygy moon means that the moon is full at the same time its orbit is nearest the earth.
Make sense?

Oh well.
It doesn't have to make sense to be beautiful!
And it was beautiful... but hazy.
Ah, the PNW.
August = Haze.

I remembered just in time to see the moon peeking over the hills,
and happily went clickety-clickety-click.
I can look through my photos and just about watch it like a movie, but I'll just share a few.









Looks like a big pumpkin!

2 comments:

Monica said...

Absolutely beautiful! I was fast asleep when the moon came up last night. But, the girls at work filled me in about how huge it was first thing this morning. :( sorry I missed it!

Sara McD said...

Gorgeous. We could barely make it out through thick clouds here.

Last night my boys and the dog camped out with Daddy on our property in the hopes of seeing a meteor shower at 4a.m. (see? I can use sciency words too!) but they all came scrambling home and INTO MY BED in the wee hours because the tent leaked massively during the thunder storm. I had warned them but who listens to Mom?