Supermoon on Weekends

The biggest full moon is called "supermoon," will fill the skies this weekend. Bright light can interfere with the peak of the annual meteor shower which is a residual tail of comet Halley. 

Photographer Sandy Adams snapped this great view of the 'supermoon' full moon of March 19, 2011 over Washington, D.C. (Picture from: http://www.mnn.com/)

Supermoon this year will occur on May 6, 03:35 GMT and can be seen in the evening. At the same time, the annual Eta Aquarid meteor shower will reach its peak. "The moonlight was super Eta Aquarid meteor will cover the more dim," said Bill Cooke, a meteor expert from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, United States. 

The last supermoon was in March 2011. At the time, it was the biggest and brightest full moon in 18 years.

While the moon's extra brightness during the supermoon may wash out some of the fainter Eta Aquarid meteors, all is not lost, Cooke said.

"Our fireball cameras have already detected four bright ones. So I would say that the odds are pretty good that folks can see a bit of Halley's Comet over the next few days, if they care to take the time to look," Cooke explained. "They will be the big and bright ones, fewer in number with a rate of just a few per hour, but they will be there."

Cooke anticipates that the 2012 Eta Aquarid meteor shower will peak at up to 60 meteors per hour on May 5.

An Eta Aquarid meteor streaks over northern
Georgia on April 29, 2012. (Picture from:
http://www.spacedaily.com/)

The eta Aquarid display is one of two meteor showers created by dust from Halley's comet (the Orionid shower in October is the other). It occurs every April and May when the Earth passes through a stream of debris cast off by comet Halley during its 76-year trip around the sun.

The eta Aquarid meteor shower of 2012 actually began on April 19 and ends on May 28, but its peak is in the overnight period between Saturday and Sunday (May 5 and 6).

"Meteor watchers in the Southern Hemisphere stand the best chance of seeing any meteors," a NASA advisory from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained. 

Supermoon phenomenon appears when the full moon phase occurs at the same time as the track closest to the Earth's moon in that month. That's what will happen next Sunday, when the moon is at 356,955 kilometers from the Earth-the closest point so far this year. 

"On next Sunday, the moon could appear 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than other full moons during 2012," says astronomer Tony Phillips. *** [SPACE | ALPINE DAILY PLANET | KORAN TEMPO 3871]

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