Strawberry moon tonight: Final supermoon of 2021 to appear in the sky
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Your support makes all the difference.A supermoon will rise over the Earth tonight – for the last time this year.
The Moon will appear bigger and brighter than normal because it is unusually close. At just 228,000 miles away, it is making the last of a series of relatively close passes.
It will be the last time for anyone on Earth to see such an event for almost exactly a year. The next will appear on 14 June, 2022.
As with every such event, actually seeing tonight’s strawberry moon is fairly straightforward: head outside and look up. It might look particularly good through a telescope or binoculars
The strawberry does not refer to the colour – though the Moon sometimes does appear red during eclipses, it will not tonight – but is instead the name given to June’s full Moon. It is named because it comes around the time the strawberry is harvested in north America.
There is some debate about whether tonight’s Moon is truly a supermoon, partly because the term has a loose definition. It was first coined by an astrologer, Richard Nolle, in 1979 and is used when the Moon is within 90 per cent of its closest approaches to Earth.
But there are a range of different thresholds. Nasa noted in April that those different definitions mean that there are different lists of supermoons: some consider all of the Moons between March and June to be supermoons, while others say that only the two full Moons of April and May count.
As well as changing how the Moon looks in the night sky – though sometimes by such small differences that it is not possible to distinguish with the naked eye – supermoons also have other effects, such as making high and low tide more extreme.
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