Sectorgame

Spotted it over at the BBC news site. Anyone take any nice pics?

It was cloudy at my place :/

Light clouds. Only saw it the night before.

The "supermoon" really didn't look any different than any other night, at least not to the naked eye. The human eye does a crappy job of judging size without some point of reference.

only time it looked any different to me was when it was low on the horizon, looked like a dull sun

At 1:30am when I looked at the moon that morning, it looked the same and still small. My uncle says it looked big around 2am, but it didn't to me. As for it looking big on the horizon; I've seen it look bigger when fairly close to the horizon a month ago than the size it was near the horizon when the so-called supermoon took place.

I remember seeing a or something akin to a Supermoon many years ago. It was distinctly bigger on the horizon and a orangey hue was cast upon it - It almost looked as red as Mars.

The "really big Moon on the horizon" phenomenon is actually something of an optical illusion. If you take pictures of the Moon when it's low in the sky and then further up, they'll show pretty much the exact same size. There's been quite a bit of debate over what actually causes this illusion, but one possible explanation is that our brain is used to objects on the horizon being much further away, and thus treats the sky as a gently-curving surface, instead of a half-sphere; therefore, when the Moon is down by the horizon, our brain "boosts" its size to compensate.

It can also appear normal size on the horizon depending on the night. If it is an illusion in this case, I wonder why on some nights it doesn't appear big on the horizon to me. Maybe my brain is not as affected by the optical illusion as the average person or maybe it isn't an illusion on certain nights?

gary wrote:It can also appear normal size on the horizon depending on the night. If it is an illusion in this case, I wonder why on some nights it doesn't appear big on the horizon to me. Maybe my brain is not as affected by the optical illusion as the average person or maybe it isn't an illusion on certain nights?

I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as an 'average person'....

More likely that your perception varies on a day to day basis, with memory influencing it as much as the various atmospheric and lighting phenomena. So even if the local conditions are making the moon appear bigger to your eyes, your brain may either downplay or exaggerate.