Supermoon over the Small City

On the evening of Monday 14^th November our social media feeds became awash with images of the beautiful and unexpected sunset all over Perthshire. People snapped away on their phones and cameras, capturing the all too brief moment.

I say unexpected because most of us were aware of the forecast ‘supermoon’ anticipated to occur after darkness fell, but few realised that this spectacular technicoloured sunset would be it’s warm up act. As the moon began to reveal it's full glory in the clear night sky many of us began to wish that a) we were better photographers and b) we’d made time to Google what a ‘supermoon’ actually is.

Allow us to briefly elaborate. A supermoon results when the moon reaches it’s full phase (i.e. a whole jaffa cake) at the closest point to Earth, causing it to look somewhat bigger and brighter in the sky than usual. On November 14, 2016, the full moon was 356,508 km from Earth, the closest since January 1948.

On top of it’s bigger than usual size, a supermoon also has an additional ‘lowhanging’ effect- an optical illusion caused by the moon being close to the horizon, where it can be measured against familiar objects such as trees and houses.

Although supermoons are in themselves not necessarily a once in a lifetime experience each has it’s own unique characteristics, and according to NASA the one on November 14^th is the brightest supermoon in over half a century, and unlikely to be beaten until 2034.

Areas with low horizons and low pollution are generally best for moon-gazing and the photographers in our gallery were on hand, putting all their technical knowledge and equipment to the test to bring us these gorgeous shots from all over Perthshire.

With special thanks to all the photographers for contributing their beautiful pictures to our gallery; Gordon Muir, Anne Mitchell, Evelyn Kelly, Tom Ryan, Andrew Harvey, Marysia Macfarlane, Peter Murray, Ian Sinclair, Derek Browning, Dave Robertson, Ian Black, Gordon Sime