Don't worry if you miss it though. A super blue moon doesn't look any different than any other supermoon and there are usually three per year.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
50 points (100.0% liked)
Space
7287 readers
15 users here now
News and findings about our cosmos.
Subcommunity of Science
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
And any "super moon" looks exactly like a slightly larger full moon, which happens every month.
It's silly how this term became such an exciting headline.
The "14 years" part of the headline is particularly annoying. This thing that happens several times a year will happen the second time this month next week! It's like a headline about getting three paychecks in a month and how it won't happen again for six months. Technically true, but it's still a regular paycheck.
Yeah. There's only two situations where the Moon looks "unusual"; lunar eclipses (sometimes called "blood moons" in headlines because of course they need to make that even more clickbaity) and conjunctions (where it's not really the Moon that looks unusual, there's just an unusual dot of light right next to it). The rest of the time it's just lunar phases like normal, with imperceptable-to-humans size changes of a couple of percent due to the Moon's elliptical orbit.
I mean, looking at a full Moon is still neat, but it's probably not worth a news article.
Clickbait headline:
NEW! Super Moon now with 2-8% more Moon! don't miss out!
NASA:
It's still blue, tho, right?
It's not actually blue. If there are two full moons in the same calendar month, the second full moon is referred to as "blue". It will be the same color it always is.
It would be a helluva lot cooler if it actually was blue, but alas...
My whole life has been a lie... 😩