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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
You'll see a 'supermoon' rising
NEW YORK -- The biggest and brightest full moon of the year arrives tonight as our celestial neighbour passes closer to Earth than usual.
But don't expect any "must have been a full moon" spike in crime or crazy behaviour. That's just folklore.
Tonight's event is a 'supermoon,' the closest and therefore the biggest and brightest full moon of the year. The moon will come within about 357,000 kilometres from Earth. That's about 24,600 kilometres closer than average.
That proximity will make the moon appear about 14 per cent bigger than it would if the moon were at its farthest distance, said Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory. The difference in appearance is so small "you'd be very hard-pressed to detect that with the unaided eye," he said.
The moon's distance from Earth varies, because it follows an elliptical orbit rather than a circular one.
Like any full moon, the supermoon will look bigger when it's on or near the horizon rather than higher in the sky, thanks to an optical illusion, Chester said.
The supermoon will bring unusually high tides because of its closeness and its alignment with the sun and Earth, but the effect will be modest, Chester said.
But no matter how far away a full moon is, it's not going to make people commit crimes, get admitted to a psychiatric hospital or do anything else popular belief suggests, a psychologist says.
Studies that have tried to document such connections have found "pretty much a big mound of nothing, as far as I can tell," said Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University.
Lilienfeld, an author of 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, said the notion of full moons causing bizarre behaviour ranks among the Top 10 myths because "it's so widely held and it's held with such conviction."
Lilienfeld said a key reason could be the way people pay attention to things. If something unusual happens to occur during a full moon, people who believe the myth take note and remember, even telling other people because it confirms their ideas.
-- The Associated Press
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 5, 2012 A24
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