Everyone Is Sharing Photos Of This Week’s Incredible Supermoon

On November 14th, the moon appeared at its biggest and brightest by coming as close to the earth that it has been in almost 70 years — since 1948, to be exact. Pictured above in Chicago Sunday evening, this week’s supermoon is about seven percent bigger and 15 percent brighter than a regular moon. If you missed it Sunday night or Monday morning — when it peaked at 6:22 a.m. on the east coast — you’ll still have a chance Monday evening. But after that it’ll be another 18 years until the moon comes this close again, on November 25th, 2034.

But what is a supermoon, exactly? The New York Times explains:

“The supermoon is a made-up term,” said James Lattis, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s not an astronomical term, there’s no technical definition of it.”

Supermoon was actually coined by an astrologer in the 1970s, not by a scientist. The term has come to loosely mean a full moon that is at perigee, or when the moon is at its closest position to Earth along its orbit.

The definition of a supermoon is apparently pretty loose, and they can occur multiple times per year; the next being December 14th. This one, of course, is special because of the rarity of the occurrence, and as the world got a taste of nature’s brilliant display on Sunday night and Monday morning, photographers across the globe began sharing photos on social media. Here’s just a handful of the thousands of supermoon photos on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Cameratown/status/797992424337502208

Again, if you missed the supermoon you can catch it again on Monday evening.

(Via New York Times)