The Moon Comes Around Again
As the moon wheels around Earth every 28 days and shows us a progressively greater and then stingier slice of its sun-lightened face, the distance between moon and Earth changes, too. At the nearest point along its egg-shaped orbit, its perigee, the moon may be 26,000 miles closer to us than it is at its far point.
And should the moon happen to hit its ever-shifting orbital perigee at the same time that it lies athwart from the sun, we are treated to a so-called supermoon, a full moon that can seem embraceably close — as much as 12 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than the average full moon.
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Some astronomers dislike the whole supermoon hoopla. They point out that the term originated with astrology, not astronomy; that perigee full moons are not all that rare, coming an average of every 13 ½ months; and that their apparently swollen dimensions are often as much a matter of optical illusion and wishful blinking as of relative lunar nearness. The superstar astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson grumbled archly on Twitter that the “perennially hyped” term debases the legacy of Superman, supernovas and the video game character Super Mario.
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Scientists say that while the public may think of the moon as a problem solved and a bit retro — the place astronauts visited a half-dozen times way back before Watergate and then abandoned with a giant “meh” from mankind — in fact, lunar studies is a vibrant enterprise that is yielding a wealth of insights and surprises.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/science/revisiting-the-moon.html?emc=edit_th_20140909&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=38945174&_r=0
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