This weekend sees the last full moon of the year and, once more, the papers are full of articles about supermoons.
I was wondering why no-one ever bothered about such things when I was a child, and then I happened upon this page on the time and date website, which says the term wasn’t coined until 1979, when astronomer Richard Nolle first used it.
Of course the actual phenomenon existed before that, just we didn’t have a simple word for it: the same page goes on to say that “[t]he technical term for a Supermoon is perigee-syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system”, which I guess explains why we never talked about them.
Tomorrow’s full moon has other names, too. It’s the Cold Moon, the Moon before Yule, the Long Night Moon, the Wolf Moon, the Oak Moon…
I haven’t, however, found any names for the rather lovely silver sun that features in today’s photos.
don't confuse the narrator 