On September 27, the night sky will be home to a truly special event: A rare supermoon lunar eclipse! Learn about it in this video from NASA Goddard.
The full moon will be passing through our shadow while at its nearest distance to Earth’s orbit, a coincidence that has only happened five times since 1900. The resulting lunar disk will be 20% brighter and about 15% bigger than your usual full moon, but that doesn’t mean the moon will be taking over the sky or anything. As astrophysicist and pizza-lover Neil deGrasse Tyson once reminded us:
I’m gonna point out here that a 16-inch pizza has 24 square inches more pizza than a 15-inch pizza though ( 8^2 * 3.14 vs 7.5^2 * 3.14) and if you cut your 15-inch pizza into 8 pieces each one only has 22 square inches so that extra inch of diameter gets you the equivalent of more than one whole extra piece and this food math is making me hungry. Like hungry enough for one 24-square-inch slice of pizza. And ALSO since I’m feeling pedantic, “supermoon” isn’t an adjective in this case, but rather a compound noun. The “super” part could be considered an adjective, and “supermoon” CAN be an adjective, as it will be tomorrow when I refer to the “supermoon eclipse”, using “supermoon” to modify the noun “eclipse”.
WHATEVER. I’m excited for it and I hope it won’t be overcast!
Fibromyangela 