Wolf Moon

Over the weekend, you may have noticed that the moon was on the large side. Well, you weren't seeing things. The moon this month was the closest to Earth as it was going to be for this year. This happened in 2008 and over the Christmas period too; with spectacular results. I have some photos of Christmas Lights around Brisbane with a lovely and very big full moon in the shot it looks just wonderful!

But this year, there was an added difference... a visitor from our Solar System. It was Mars coming to visit our home for a few nights before taking off the orbiting the Sun again. It's that little white dot you can just seen to the left and below the moon. I know it's not much, but that's the Red Planet in itself.
Last night - and over the weekend - the full moon was called The Wolf Moon or Harvest Moon. The name of Wolf Moon came from the North American Indians as the hungry wolves used to howl at the full moon as it rose. However, to tell you how this larger moon came about, I'll paste in the numbers from another site:

The moon is, on average, 238,855 miles (384,400 km) from Earth. The moon's orbit around Earth – which causes it to go through all its phases once every 29.5 days – is not a perfect circle, but rather an ellipse. One side of the orbit is 31,070 miles (50,000 km) closer than the other.
So in each orbit, the moon reaches this closest point to us, called perigee. Once or twice a year, perigee coincides with a full moon, as it will tonight, making the moon bigger and brighter than any other full moons during the year.

(If you'd like more information about how the moon works and how it manages to do this go to Yahoo News and you can read the whole article on this.)

I took some photos of this gorgeous moon and only a few worked out - and seeing I had to work with the clouds drifting quickly overhead and some showers of rain, I had to be patient to get the right photo at the right time. After all, I had all night to get it.