Astroblog: The Apogee (Mini) Full Moon of October 31/November 1, 2020

Wednesday, December 09, 2020

The Apogee (Mini) Full Moon of October 31/November 1, 2020


Apogee (almost) full Moon at 23:48 ACDST, October 31. Apogee was at 4:45 am ACDST and the full Moon was at 1:12 am ACSDT on November 1st.	The just past Perigee Moon at 20:36 ACST on 8 April, full Moon was at 12:35 ACST and perigee 4:30 am ACST.

Overlay of the images of the perigee and apogee Moon at the same scale	Overlay of the stellarium prediction

This is of course late, because so much has been going on. But here are my images of the October 31 perigee (mini) Moon compared to the April perigee (super) Moon. Because the Moons orbit around the Earth is elliptical, there is a point where it is closest to earth (perigee) and furthest (apogee) at this time At perigee the Moon looks bigger than at apogee, it is true for all Moon phases but we only seem to care about full Moons. On day I will do a First Quarter perigee, apogee comparison.

The images above were taken with my Experia mobile phone, No zoom 1/4000th second exposure at ISO 400 and infinity focussing. The camera was held to my 25mm Plossl lens mounted with a Meade mobile phone adapter on my unguided 114 mm Newtonian scope.

I didn't wait for official full moon, as I didn't want to be up past midnight, but caught the Moon around 1 1/2 hours before official full Moon, when the Moon was actually a little bit smaller than at official full Moon. The moon was beautiful, and turned out to be much smaller than the perigee Moon in April. I wasn't quite expecting that, but it is in line with the actual size as confirmed with the stellarium simulation. Pretty good compared to the 2014 and 2019 apogee/perigee pairs.

Looking forward to the next set of perigee/apogee Moons.

Labels: apogee, astrophotography, Moon, perigee