Sunday's supermoon will be a sight to see in Manatee County
MANATEE -- Weather permitting, Manatee County will see an event just after 10 p.m. Sunday that hasn't occurred in more than 30 years.
The moon will be at its fullest point of the year in coincidence with a total lunar eclipse to create a so-called supermoon for the first time in 32 years.
It won't happen again for another 18 years.
The lunar eclipse means the moon will move through a reddish shadow cast by the Earth in space, according to Jeff Rodgers, director of the Bishop Planetarium in Bradenton.
"In this particular case, this eclipse is happening at the same time that we also have a so-called supermoon. A supermoon occurs because the moon's orbit around the Earth is not perfectly round -- it's slightly elliptical -- which means that some
times its orbit is closer to the Earth and sometimes it's far away," Rodgers said. "It's really more accurate to call it just a slightly tiny little bit bigger moon."
According to NASA, the supermoon eclipse will last 1 hour and 11 minutes, and will be visible in North and South America, Europe, Africa, parts of West Asia and the eastern Pacific
Weather permitting, people will see the supermoon after nightfall, and the eclipse will cast it into shadow beginning at 8:11 p.m. NASA reports the total eclipse starts at 10:11 p.m. and peaks at 10:47 p.m.
"The beauty of something like this lunar eclipse is that you don't need to be in any place special to see it," Rodgers said. "Any place you can look up and see the moon is just fine."
The term "supermoon" is a fairly recently coined expression that simply means the moon is closer to the Earth. It occurs three to four times a year, said Jeff LeMieux, co-sponsor of the Astronomy Club of the Golden Isles in Georgia and an avid amateur astronomer.
The supermoon will be a "blood moon" because its color will change to a rust or blood red hue during the event. The red color is caused by the light going through the Earth's atmosphere, which scatters it.
The only colors to survive the scattering are red and orange.
It's the same reason sunsets are so colorful, said Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Because the orbit of the moon is not a perfect circle, the moon is sometimes closer to the Earth than at other times during its orbit, thus creating a supermoon, Petro said.
"When the moon is farthest away, it's known as apogee, and when it's closest, it's known as perigee," Petro said. "On (Sunday), we're going to have a perigee full moon -- the closest full moon of the year."
At perigee, Petro said the moon is more than 30,000 miles closer to Earth than at apogee, a distance that equates to more than once around the circumference of Earth.