Sunday’s super supermoon lights up our lives, and conversations

Sunday’s super supermoon lights up our lives, and conversations

Look. Up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s supermoon!

A supermoon is a moon that waxes full within 24 hours of orbiting closest to Earth, said Barbara Anthony-Twarog, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas. Since supermoons occur roughly 14 months apart, most years will have just one. 2014 gets three.

After this year’s trifecta, we won’t see another supermoon until Sept. 28, 2015. After that: Nov. 14, 2016.

But it’s not as if it’s never happened before, or that this year’s three supermoons are going to cause a tsunami.

So why are we more excited now than in years past? If anything, it is a triumph of marketing. It’s as if the moon got a new agent. It’s definitely having its moment in the sun.

Anthony-Twarog first heard the term “supermoon” several years ago. It didn’t exist in 1981 when she was getting her doctorate in astronomy from Yale.

“It seems similar to me to the terminology of blue moon,” she said. (That’s the layman’s term for the second full moon in a single month). “Neither are scientific. But they’re perfect for the Internet. And if it spreads interest in the sky, then I don’t think anyone has any objection. There’s nothing incorrect about it.”

Astronomers call this spot in the orbit “perigee.” The normal distance to the moon is about 238,000 miles. But the supermoon will be closer to the Earth by about 17,000 miles, Anthony-Twarog said, or a scant reach-out-and-touch-it 221,000 miles away.

So it will appear larger — 14 percent larger than when the moon is farthest from Earth.

 “It’s a rather dramatic presence at night,” he said. “Since people crawled out of the caves there has been a sense of mystery and power about it. There are all sorts of positive associations, such as love. It’s kind of like turning the lights down for romance. The sun has gone away, and you have this lovely iridescent light that brightens up the landscape.”

On the other hand, the moon also is said to stir passions of a more sinister variety.

Wolves howl at the moon, and werewolves are said to come out during a full moon. The word “lunacy” comes from “luna,” which is Latin for moon.

“Back in the Middle Ages, people used to believe that the moon was the location of the dividing line between earthly and heavenly things,” Trowbridge said. “That’s where we get the word sublunary, which literally means “under the moon.”

So make a date with the moon on Sunday. And remember. When you look up in the sky, you won’t just be seeing a regular moon.

This … is a supermoon!