Moon-1.31.10, originally uploaded by david parmet.
You might have noticed that the Moon looks awfully large this week. In fact you are correct. The Moon is at perigee – at the point in its orbit that it is closest to the Earth.
At this point, the Moon is a couple ten thousand miles closer than it is at apogee, the furthest from Earth. And its roughly 14% larger than normal.
So if you felt a bit loony this week, blame the Moon.
More information at Moon Connection.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=0f85602f-9231-40e4-9511-d5f5315f360a)
The sign of a perfect star party – the company, the equipment, the quality of the sky and the number of targets you can check off from your list. Last night had a bit of everything.
The Westchester Amateur Astronomers gather monthly at Ward Pound Ridge in Cross River to enjoy the dark skies. Last night we started with a 20 hour old Moon and quickly moved on to Mercury, the Orion Nebula, the Beehive and (my own personal long-time, never realized White Whale) the Leo Triplet (which I might add I managed to find manually).
And all night long we enjoyed great views of Saturn from the variety of telescopes assembled.
The clear skies are expected to continue at least for tonite, so I’ll be out late again.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=93971c6e-a906-4a87-9cfd-482ba99ea64d)