SuperDay, SuperMoon

The weather today in central Virginia city is t-shirts and shorts weather. At 3 PM it’s sunny and 84° F. Pollen season hasn’t started yet. Birds are building nests. Squirrels are digging up nuts they buried last fall. Bradford Pear trees are in full bloom along the Boulevard, the main drag through my small city.

<< This Bradford Pear tree blooms beside the entrance to the Post Office.

Today the moon is not only full but closer to the earth than it’s been in years. This phenomenon was dubbed a supermoon by astrologer Richard Nolle in the 1970s.

A normal moon, photographed from my front yard with a cheap camera, looks like this at 33x zoom. Tonight’s moon will be different.

Tonight’s moon will be at lunar perigee, the closest it’s been to Earth in 18 years.

I’m going to stop writing now and wait until nightfall before continuing this blog entry. I want to take a picture of tonight’s moon as it rises behind my house. I have a feeling this moon will be spectacular. I only hope its enormous gravity doesn’t suck shingles off my new roof.

(Time Passes. It gets dark outside.)

Night has fallen. I walked across the street and snapped a photo of the moon rising behind my house. Not unexpectedly, the photo was worthless. The supermoon looked pitifully small in the photo. So with the help of the GIMP, I created a picture showing how a proper supermoon should look.

Or, for those who have read Samuel Delaney’s masterwork Dhalgren, maybe this is the moon the Kid saw rising in the sky above Bellona.