ScienceCasts: The Super Moon of May 2012

[stevegaston]

i have a question that people may want to know. a couple of years ago i seen a burnt orange full moon that turned an angry blood red and took 25 minutes to fall from 12 oclock in south australia whilst fishing off jetty

[Nawroz]

About four or five years ago in March 20th around 4pm I saw a huge moon on top of a mountain, I will never forget how beautiful was that... wish to see that again. :)

[robertgift]

Well done video!
Larger-appearing moon at horizon is fully understood.
You have distant objects of known (familiar) size with which to compare the lunar disk.
A tree 100 feet away will look smaller 200 feet distant. Yet the moon will still appear exactly the same size behind the more distant tree.
Regardless of background references, at perigee I cannot discern the 14% difference.

[DuctapePenguin]

This video has a MAJOR ERROR at 2:57 video says "no trouble was reported" which is FALSE. There was major trouble reported. Last supermoon window of 2011 coincided with the Japan tsunami.

[bermuvo]

Más vale que vayas colocando una marca bien visible en el calendario para que no pierdas la oportunidad de ver la luna en todo su esplendor el próximo mayo. ScienceCasts de la NASA nos explican el porqué.

[usedhair]

Excellent explanation, but please be careful of terminology. The moon is continually described in this as "being larger". The size of the moon does not change. Please be careful to say that the moon "appears" larger.

[blobrana]

Full moon (diameter 33.476') in the constellation Libra at 3:35.1 UT, 6th May, 2012
The lunar perigee is at 3:40.1 UT, 6th of May, 2012.
This will be the biggest full moon of the year.

[DuctapePenguin]

Bureaucratic scientists typically ignore seismic correlations to biology or earthquakes as they believe its too close to "astrology" and are very afraid of being ridiculed. Jim Berkland on the other hand is a web scientist doing pioneering work on the subject.

[Xottle]

The video says nothing happened in March 2011, when the last super moon (even closer to earth than the one coming in may) occurred. People forget, that was the biggest month of big earthquakes in maybe a hundred years. March 11 is when Japan had the 9.0 quake. All through the rest of March there were many earthquakes above 6.0. Something sure did happen!

[bradkrit]

I thought it was because you get a lens effect since the light passes through the atmosphere at an angle?

[HardThrasher]

That's like saying the Tsunami was caused by my turing the oven on, which I also did on March 11th. There's no connection between the two

[IbnFawzi]

Scientists can't explain why the moon looks larger on the horizon? It's called perception. It looks like that because you can easily compare it to the objects.

[FInixNOver]

Like it has been said in the comments, the moon will be more easily perceived as bigger or smaller when near the horizon or buildings, because the brain can now "see"objects which are physically possible to be measured, and since it also knows that the moon is supposed to be bigger than said objects, even accounting for the moon's distance to earth, the brain will "make" look bigger as opposed to when it's high in the sky where there are no comparable objects. So, you can indeed explain it ;)

[Stated.]

I remember this event I was 4 YEARS OLD

[Defisim]

I hope we're in Europe can see the super as well

[Demolitiondude]

Best time to play Werewolf the Apocalypse and/or Werewolf the Forsaken.

[piratestonesandbones]

Does it half to be a full moon in order to appear large? Because I saw a half-moon that was just as big...

[austinismadcrunk]

@docakh I stared at it for about 15 minutes through binoculars last night while listening to "All Systems Go - The Launch" from the Apollo 13 soundtrack. So so good.

[spidaxtreme]

Man this random old dude said this to me on may 5th and i thought he was joking!

[comander]

hi thanks for your story and very interesting video greeting