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If you missed the spectacular Super Pink Moon last month, then there is good news. On May 7 there will be another: the Super Flower Moon.
This “supermoon” will not look like a flower, it is called that because it accompanies the colorful spring flowers.
But it’s your last chance to see a supermoon this year – the next isn’t until April 2021.
A full moon is called a supermoon when it coincides with the Moon at (or within 90 percent of) its closest point to Earth (its “perigee”), since it follows its elliptical orbit around us.
The May supermoon will be 361,184 km from Earth, compared to the average distance from Earth to the Moon of 384,400 km. A supermoon can be up to 14% larger and 30% brighter than a normal full moon.
Technically, a new moon can also be a supermoon, but we don’t tend to mark them because we can’t see them!
Read more about the moon:
The best time to study the surface of the Moon is not actually the night of the full moon, as it can be too bright. Instead, choose a night a few days before or after the full moon to see more details.
The easiest features to detect with binoculars are craters on the Moon, especially younger ones, which tend to be brighter.
If you look from the northern hemisphere, you will see a large, shiny crater just to the left of the center of the Moon’s surface. This is Copernicus, which is 93 km wide and believed to be around 800 million years old (relatively young by the Moon’s standards).
If you imagine a line of symmetry drawn vertically across the Moon’s disk, the Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility is more or less where Copernicus would reflect on the other side. Remember, if you are looking from the southern hemisphere, the Moon will appear upside down compared to looking from the northern hemisphere.
You should also be able to see two more distinctive craters with your binoculars: Aristarchus, which is to the left of Copernicus, and the huge Tycho crater at the bottom.
If you look closely enough, you will see that there are many more craters, each evidence of the billions of years of meteorite bombardment from the Moon.
Reader Q&A: What would happen if there was no Moon?
Asked by: Derek Palmer, Eton Wick
The most immediate effect (apart from the lack of moonlight, of course) would be on Earth’s tides. With only the gravitational influence of the Sun, the difference between high and low tides would be drastically reduced, as would tidal drag, slowing down Earth at a rate that adds approximately 0.002 seconds to the duration of a day each century. In the long term, the effects would be much more serious.
The Earth’s climate is sensitively dependent on the 23.5 ° inclination of the Earth’s axis, and without the stabilizing presence of our relatively large Moon, the gravity of the other planets would produce great changes in this angle, as it does with Mars, whose The tilt changes 60 ° in a few million years.
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