NEW YORK \u2014 The moon will look slightly bigger and brighter Wednesday night during the closest supermoon of the year.<\/p>\n
The moon’s orbit around the Earth isn’t a perfect circle, so it gets nearer and farther as it swings around. A so-called supermoon happens when a full moon is closer to Earth in its orbit. That makes the moon look up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter than the faintest moon of the year, according to NASA.<\/p>\n
November’s supermoon, on Nov. 5, is the second of three supermoons this year and also the closest: The moon will come within just under 222,000 miles of Earth.<\/p>\n
Tides may be slightly higher during a supermoon because the moon is closer to Earth, said astronomer Lawrence Wasserman with Lowell Observatory. But the difference isn’t very noticeable.<\/p>\n
No special equipment is needed to view the supermoon if clear skies permit. But the change in the moon’s size can be tough to discern with the naked eye.<\/p>\n
“The difference is most obvious as a comparison between other images or observations,” said Shannon Schmoll, director of Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University, in an email.<\/p>\n
Supermoons happen a few times a year. One in October made the moon look somewhat larger, and another in December will be the last of the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 The moon will look slightly bigger and brighter Wednesday night during the closest supermoon of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1302,3811,526,3812,134,3729,7221,3,3813,3814,79,193,99,74,1505,2987,3324,2986],"class_list":["post-265573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-education","tag-homes","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-nature","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-science","tag-space","tag-sports","tag-technology","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}