Nov 14th, 2016: Supermoon

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Diaphone Jim

Garrr!
...
The moon, in fact, has been this big and this close every month since 1948 and long before.
Failing to use the term "FULL moon" makes the whole thing meaningless, which it basically is anyway.

Sure, it's a dumb name, but if you have even a passing interest in astronomy, you should be happy that the hoi polloi are getting excited by this and going outside and looking up in the sky. The more people take an interest in this, the more likely astronomy will continue to receive funding for research.

Besides, you are wrong.

Look at this Lunar Perigee and Apogee table.

Just by way of example, in July, the closest the moon got to the Earth was 369,658 km. This month, it got as close as 356,511 km. That a difference of 13,147 km or greater than the diameter of the earth.

And that's just the closest it gets. When you look at the farthest it gets, then the difference is more dramatic. The IOTD picture above points out that there was a full moon in 2012 that coincided with apogee, and the moon was 406,364 km away from the earth during that full moon. That's a difference of 49,853 km or about 4 earth diameters farther away when compared to this month's full moon.

All that is hard to comprehend. But the picture at the top of the thread is instantly understandable.