The year's last supermoon will rise into the night sky Sunday, and Northeast Ohioans may actually be able to see this one, with favorable weather conditions.
The full moon officially peaks at 10:47 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 3, but it won't reach perigee, or the point in its orbit when it's closest to the Earth, until 3:45 a.m. the next day. Unless you're willing to stay awake all night, the best viewing for you will be Sunday night. In Northeast Ohio, that happens to coincide when cloud cover is expected to be at a minimum (for once).
What's the weather forecast?
Make sure to bundle up for the viewing, as temperatures across Northeast Ohio will hover in the upper 30s after 8 p.m., with slightly breezy winds creating wind chills a few degrees cooler. That little cloud cover thankfully means there's little chance you'll get rained on, so there should be no disruptions if you plan to camp out to see the supermoon.
What exactly is a supermoon?
Basically, a supermoon happens when a full moon roughly coincides with the moon's perigee. Since the moon's orbit around Earth isn't perfectly circular, the distance from Earth varies slightly. According to space.com, that coincidence leads the moon to appear 14 percent larger, and 30 percent brighter.
This upcoming supermoon won't be the closest one of the year. That happened on May 25, but since that perigee didn't coincide with a full moon, it technically wasn't a supermoon.
"Supermoons don't happen every month because the moon's orbit changes orientation as the Earth goes around the sun. So, the long axis of the moon's elliptical path around the Earth points in different directions, meaning that a full (or new) moon won't always happen at apogee [when the moon is furthest from the Earth in its orbit] or perigee," says space.com.
