‘Super Moon’ Images from Around the World, June 2013

The full Moon of June 23, 2013 was the largest Moon of the year. This so-called “Super Moon” was at perigee — or at its closest point in its orbit to Earth, and was 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full Moons of 2013.

But, if you looked up at the Moon last night and didn’t know about this, you may not have noticed! Some claims circulating on the internet tended to exaggerate how large the Moon would actually appear. However, that doesn’t mean the Moon wasn’t photogenic last night! The Moon is always a great target for photography or just gazing with your own eyes, and these images from Universe Today readers attest to the beauty of our closest companion in the night sky.

This lead image from Raven Yu from the Philippines shows the difference in size between last night’s perigee Moon and the apogee Moon (when it was farthest from Earth during its orbit) last November.

If you want to find out more about the science of the perigee Super Moon, read our detailed article here.

See more beautiful images, below!

Three different pictures of the Moon from June 23, shared by Guiseppe Petricca from Italy, detailing not only the perigee Super Moon, but the ‘Moon Illusion” — of how the Moon looks bigger when it is close to the horizon.

“The middle one is the Moon at culmination in the local sky and the other two are taken as low as possible my local horizon permitted,” Guiseppe said via email. “Doing this, I managed to obtain two results: the first one is observing the different colours that due to the Rayleigh Scattering, ‘paint’ our satellite, when it’s low on its elevation. The second one is that, keeping a fixed magnification (24x – 110mm) one can easily debunk the optical illusion of the ‘bigger moon when it’s low on the horizon’. Since, if you observe carefully, the lower two ‘Moons’ are smaller than the higher one. However, the total personal experience is surely wonderful!! And the ‘horizon illusion’ makes you really think that the Moon is way bigger that the reality.”

Miguel Claro captured this beautiful image of the huge full Moon rising above a Moorish castle in Sesimbra, Portugal. “The church Nossa Senhora do Castelo stands on the spot where king Sancho I built a Romanesque chapel in the early 13th century,” Miguel said via email. “This image was captured 2 km away from the subject.” Miguel used a Canon 50D – ISO640; 1/80 sec. + ED80 APO refractor Astro Professional 560mm at f/7 taken on 23/06/2013 at 21h22.

You can see more great images of this perigee Super Moon — and lots more great astrophotography at our Flickr group page.

Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.