This time I will recount events that happened a week ago. With all the mooring excitement and questions from the forum to answer, I had not gotten to write about the most amazing moonrise I have ever experienced.
We finally had another clear evening on a cold Friday when temperatures where hovering in the lower teens. Lots of people gathered at the bridge with their cameras to snap pictures of a promising sunset. I decided to brave the cold, since I do not like how the pictures look like when taken through the glass of the bridge's windows; it imparts on them a bluish tint. I could have been warm in the bridge and jump outside just in the right moment to take a picture, but I might miss a jumping whale or a dancing penguin in the process. Better to be outside altogether.
I dressed warmly and went to the bow, where I could see a lot of the horizon. We were traveling towards the west, northwest, so I was ideally placed to get some sunset pictures. I saw a couple of penguins and icebergs, and was pretty happy with the photo session so far. I knew the first clouds that will turn orange and pink hues by the sunset laid way back towards the east, so I look back on starboard to check the sunset's progression and I saw something like this
Moonrise close tot he perigee made for a wonderful spectacle in the Southern Seas.
At that moment the moon was fainter and I had hard time believing that I was actually watching the moon on the horizon and not a cloud; it seemed huge. I am well aware that for some unknown reason, our brains perceive the moon to be bigger when it is on the horizon than when it is straight above us. I do an activity in class with my students, in which I ask them to go outside on a full moon, put their arms straight in from of their eyes, and use their small finger to measure the moon. Then repeat the same measurement a few hours later when the moon is high on the sky. Result: the moon looks bigger in the horizon but it is exactly the same size. Give it a try in three weeks when the full moon returns.
I thought I was watching the largest moon I have ever seen. I thought it might just be an optical illusion for being at such southern latitude. In any case, I was not going to waste the marvelous opportunity I had of taking pictures of icebergs with an almost full moon, so I abandoned the project of the sunset pictures and went to starboard for the moon.
The moon kept getting brighter as the background got darker during the moonrise close to the perigee
The sky kept getting darker so the moon's shine kept growing. I have seen some orange moons in October, but had only seen it so orange during a lunar eclipse. I set the exposure controls on my camera to keep the details of the moon at expense of the brighter sky that we had, so the next pictures are darker than what the sky was at that time. I did this because the moon would have appeared as a white disk, which was not the picture I was looking for. Here is the moon over an iceberg.
A perigee moon hover over a large iceberg
A couple of days later I e-mailed one of my brothers and mentioned the amazing moonrise. He replied saying he had seen it as well, back in Mexico, and that he had read it was a 'supermoon'. I asked him for details and this is what I learned (thanks brother).
Last Saturday's full moon coincided in the US, within an hour, with the time at which we are closer to the moon on its elliptical orbit around us (astronomers call 'perigee' when moon is closest to earth). Last time this happened was in March of 1993, when my students were not even born yet.
A perigee moon with an iceberg. I like the moonshine on the water surface next to the berg.
This coincidence in having the full moon in perigee makes the moon look 14% bigger and 30% brighter. No wonder I was so amazed when I was taking the pictures, even if I saw the moon on Friday and not on Saturday. Astronomers call this a 'preigee moon'.
There are no significant consequences in our everyday life due to the perigee. The difference in distance to the moon between perigee and apogee (when the moon is farthest) is 50,000km. A small fraction of the of 380,000 km average distance.
Had I been inside the bridge, I might have missed this three Adélies dancing to the perigee moon.
Three waddling Adélies diruing the perigee moon.
Disclaimer: I took the pictures in which the moon looks largest using a lens with focal lens of 300 mm, which magnifies objects. The actual size of the image of the moon that I saw was smaller, but still very impressive!
Alex just told me that they were able to recover all the data from the moored instruments, but that one of the current meters stopped recording in September due to an unknown cause. They will check if it was the battery that died prematurely.