Supermoon

You probably all know that one of my pet hates is unnecessary hype. 

I hate clickbait headlines on news sites that ask really big questions, campaigns that create a nonexistent problem which is miraculously solved by the product (look up the origin of the word "halitosis"), "real" ingredients (as against imaginary ones) or ingredients that the product is “free of”, but wouldn't have been used anyway. Yes, you can call me "Princess Rantipants". 

But on to today’s hype: the "supermoon".

Recently, we had yet another one. You probably know that the Moon goes from perigee (when it's closest to the Earth) to apogee (when it's furthest away) each orbit. The orbit itself is nearly round, so the difference isn't much - something like 7 per cent from average to largest. You probably wouldn't notice without measuring.

Supermoons happen when a full moon coincides with a perigee, so the moon is full, big and bright. But there's no agreed definition of "supermoon", so I can't say precisely what "coincides" means. But it seems to happen a couple of times per year.

The term "supermoon" itself is only a few decades old, having being coined in 1979. Before that, there were just full moons.

The new thing, it seems, is giving supermoons names. We've had names like harvest, sturgeon, and worm supermoons. We've even had a "super blood wolf moon".
I have utterly no idea who gets to name supermoons, but it seems that different countries can allocate their own naming rights.

How long is it since 1979? Well, space.com says that "April's full moon is known as the Pink Moon, though it has many other nicknames by different cultures". Seriously? 40 years seems a bit of a stretch for the term "different cultures"!

Here's my supermoon photo. It's probably no different to any other full-ish moon photo, and you can't even gauge the size of the Moon because you don't know how far away Melbourne's buildings are from my place.

In my culture it's known as the "Pentax out the bedroom window supermoon".