Moon to seem 14% larger tonight

May 5, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

According to NASA’s calculations, tonight is when the moon will hit your eye like a big pizza pie, to paraphrase Dean Martin. It’s “super moon” time.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is letting its enthusiasm show in a new video on the subject. “The timing is almost perfect,” it notes. At 11:34 p.m. EDT, May’s full moon will reach perigee — the closest point to Earth in its elliptical pattern — and “only one minute later, the moon will line up with the Earth and the sun to become gloriously full.”

For a bunch of scientists, that’s pretty poetic talk.

The moon will appear 14 percent larger than other full moons of 2012.

This doesn’t sound like a super moon — it sounds like a super-duper moon.

Anthony Cook, astronomical observer at Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory, is a little more measured in his view of the upcoming phenomenon.

It will be 30 percent brighter, yes, but that’s 30 percent brighter than the moon is when it is at “apogee” — the farthest point in its elliptical orbit around the Earth — he said.

“I’m a little skeptical that most people would casually see that this full moon looks huge compared to the one that rises six months from now,” he said. “You’re talking about a fairly small size difference in something that’s already small.”