Full Moon of July 2014

July 28, 2014

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Photographers: Top - Alvaro Ibanez Perez Bottom - Pal Vardi Nagy
Summary Authors: Alvaro Ibanez Perez; Pal Vardi Nagy; Jim Foster

The photo above shows the full Moon rising over Daganzo de Arriba, near Madrid, Spain on July 12, 2014. The Moon always looks huge when it lies just above the horizon, but July's full Moon may have looked even bigger than normal because it was closer. It happened to be in the full phase when it was close to the Earth. Because the Moon's orbit is elliptical, its distance from Earth varies, and thus so does its apparent size. The bottom photos captured from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, nicely illustrates the difference in size between the perigean full Moon of July 11 and the full Moon of February 15, 2014, when it was near apogee. July's full Moon appeared approximately 15 percent larger and 25 percent brighter than February's moon.

Photo Details: Camera Model: Canon EOS DIGITAL 550D; Lens: Sigma 18-200 mm DC OS; Focal Length: 5mm; Aperture: f/10.0; Exposure Time: 1/80 s; ISO equiv: 400. Bottom - Camera Model: Canon 1100D; manual mode; same pixel resolution; T2. Note that both the February and July full Moons were taken using the same photographic set up.

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