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| Joseph de Ca'th Lon with the Hale Telescope |
Today, Joseph de Ca'th Lon is in Palomar Observatory, in San Diego, California.
He's following an Eli Poppins proposal: watching the supermoon tonight, and the best place to do it is in an astronomical observatory.
If he chose the Montsec Observatory in Àger to see The Draconids, now he has decided to travel to the West Coast of the United and honour an important astronomer, George E. Hale
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 technical name is the perigee-syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system.
The term supermoon is not astronomical, but originated in modern astrology. The association of the Moon with both oceanic and crustal tides has led to claims that the supermoon phenomenon may be associated with increased risk of events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but the evidence of such a link is widely held to be unconvincing.
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| The supermoon behind The Parthenon, Athens |
The Moon's distance varies each month between approximately 357,000 kilometers and 406,000 km due to its elliptical orbit around the Earth, distances given are centre-to-centre.
A full moon at perigee is visually larger up to 14% in diameter, or about 30% in area, and shines 30% more light than one at its farthest point, or apogee.
More information: Time and Date
The full moon cycle is the period between alignments of the lunar perigee with the sun and the earth, which is about 13.9443 synodic months, about 411.8 days. Thus approximately every 14th full moon will be a supermoon. However, halfway through the cycle the full moon will be close to apogee, and the new moons immediately before and after can be supermoons. Thus there may be as many as three supermoons per full moon cycle.
More information: The Supermoon Patterns
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| The Supermoon in New York City |
Palomar Observatory is an astronomical observatory located in San Diego County, California, The United States, 145 kilometers southeast of Los Angeles, California, in the Palomar Mountain Range.
It is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) located in Pasadena, California.
Research time is granted to Caltech and its research partners, which include the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Cornell University.
The observatory operates several telescopes, including the famous 200-inch Hale Telescope and the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope. In addition, other instruments and projects have been hosted at the observatory, such as the Palomar Testbed Interferometer and the historic 18-inch Schmidt telescope, Palomar Observatory's first telescope, dating from 1936.
More information: Palomar Observatory, San Diego
George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) was an American solar astronomer, best known for his discovery of magnetic fields in sunspots, and as the leader or key figure in the planning or construction of several world-leading telescopes; namely, the 40-inch refracting telescope at Yerkes Observatory, 60-inch Hale reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, 100-inch Hooker reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson, and the 200-inch Hale reflecting telescope at Palomar Observatory.
More information: Amazing Space
Like buried treasures, the outposts of the universe have beckoned to the adventurous from immemorial times. Princes and potentates, political or industrial, equally with men of science, have felt the lure of the uncharted seas of space, and through their provision of instrumental means the sphere of exploration has made new discoveries and brought back permanent additions to our knowledge of the heavens.
George E. Hale
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