Sydney supermoon August 2014

A supermoon is the coincidence of a full moon or a new moon with the closest approach the Moon makes to the Earth on its elliptical orbit, resulting in the largest apparent size of the lunar disk as seen from Earth. The obviously happen all over the place, but it certainly helps when they are somewhere with clear skies or a good backdrop.

The technical name for a supermoon is one that should be trotted out more often: It is a perigee-syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system. Funnily enough the opposite of a supermoon doesn’t seem to get photographed nearly so often.