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The longitude gives the position east or west of the Moon's prime meridian, which is the line passing from the lunar north pole through the point on the lunar surface directly facing Earth to the lunar south pole. (See also Earth's prime meridian.) This can be thought of as the midpoint of the visible Moon as seen from the Earth.
A supermoon is a full moon or a new moon that nearly coincides with perigee—the closest that the Moon comes to the Earth in its orbit—resulting in a slightly larger-than-usual apparent size of the lunar disk as viewed from Earth. [1] The technical name is a perigee syzygy (of the Earth–Moon–Sun system) or a full (or new) Moon around ...
[12] [13] On the other hand, the time-averaged distance (rather than the inverse of the average inverse distance) between the centers of Earth and the Moon is 385,000.6 km (239,228.3 mi). One can also model the orbit as an ellipse that is constantly changing, and in this case one can find a formula for the semi-major axis, again involving ...
At perigee (closest), since the Moon is up to 14% closer to Earth than at apogee (most distant), it subtends a solid angle which is up to 30% larger. Consequently, given the same phase, the Moon's brightness also varies by up to 30% between apogee and perigee. [209] A full (or new) moon at such a position is called a supermoon. [203] [204] [210]
The supermoon of 14 November 2016 was 356,511 km (221,526 mi) away [1] from the center of Earth. Supermoons occur 3–4 times per year. [2] As the Earth revolves around the Sun, approximate axial parallelism of the Moon's orbital plane (tilted five degrees to the Earth's orbital plane) results in the revolution of the lunar nodes relative to the Earth.
The Moon completes one orbit around the Earth in 27.32166 days. The two points at which the Moon crosses the ecliptic are known as its orbital nodes, shown as "N1" and "N2" (ascending node and descending node, respectively), and the line connecting them is known as the line of nodes.
A lunar node is either of the two orbital nodes of the Moon; that is, the two points at which the orbit of the Moon intersects the ecliptic. The ascending (or north) node is where the Moon moves into the northern ecliptic hemisphere, while the descending (or south) node is where the Moon enters the southern ecliptic hemisphere.
The synodic month (Greek: συνοδικός, romanized: synodikós, meaning "pertaining to a synod, i.e., a meeting"; in this case, of the Sun and the Moon), also lunation, is the average period of the Moon's orbit with respect to the line joining the Sun and Earth: 29 (Earth) days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2.9 seconds. [5]