Will you be watching on Sunday for the ‘supermoon’ of the year?
This lunar show will be the second act in a trio of supermoons that are gracing our skies this summer. Supermoons occur thanks to coincidental timing - when a full moon combines with the satillite being at its closest to Earth.
It means the moon will appear 16 per cent larger and 30 per cent brighter than usual, Euronews reported.
While some are calling it a ‘supermoon', the astronomical community prefers to use the term ‘perigee full moon', pointing out they occur every year and are therefore not as rare as some claim.
In 2014 there are three supermoons, on July 12, August 10, and September 9.
The monthly full moon always looks like a big disk, but because its orbit is egg-shaped around the Earth, there are times when the moon is at what astronomers call perigee, its shortest distance from Earth in the roughly month-long lunar cycle, or it can be at apogee, its farthest distance from Earth.
Likewise, because the size of the moon's orbit varies slightly, each monthly perigee is not always the same distance away from Earth.
