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Biggest Full Moon of the Year Occurs This Saturday

May 1, 2012 by Steve Berardi 6 Comments

Photo by Gregory H. Revera (used under the CC-Attr-SA license)
Photo by Gregory H. Revera (used under the CC-Attr-SA license)
The biggest full moon of the year will occur this Saturday, May 5th at 11:35 PM EDT. The moon will appear extra large on Saturday, because that’s when it makes its closest approach to Earth (also known as perigee).

With a larger moon in the sky, it’ll be a great opportunity to get some good photographs. The moon will also be about 16% brighter than normal, so you’ll be able to use faster shutter speeds which will help make the photo sharper.

Here are some great articles from around the web to help prepare you for photographing the “super moon” this weekend:

  • Moon Photography Made Simple
  • How To Photograph Landscapes With the Moon

Good luck! And, feel free to share any moon photography tips with us by leaving a comment below 🙂

If you’d like to be reminded of astronomical events like this in the future, then please sign up for our free weekly newsletter!


steveb2About the Author: Steve Berardi is a naturalist, photographer, software engineer, and founder of PhotoNaturalist. You can usually find him hiking in the beautiful mountains and deserts of southern California.

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Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: big, landscape, large, moon, moonrise, moonscape, moonset, perigee, super, supermoon

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Miaz Akemapa says

    May 2, 2012 at 1:08 am

    wow!!
    can’t wait for it…

    Reply
  2. Zack Jones says

    May 2, 2012 at 4:58 am

    Thanks for the heads up. Looks like I’ll be staying up late this coming Saturday night.

    Reply
  3. Winston Mitchell says

    May 4, 2012 at 6:58 am

    16% faster shutter speed…wow…that’s over a fifth of a stop!
    My problem is that my camera settings work in third or half stop increments…please help.
    Sorry…the engineer in me got outta control…please forgive.

    Reply
  4. Steve Berardi says

    May 4, 2012 at 10:27 am

    @Winston – You’re right, it’s not that much, but there’s a lot of little things in photography that you can do to increase the sharpness of your shots (e.g. mirror lock-up, tripod collars, using a remote shutter release, using the sharpest apertures of your lenses, etc). Sure, by themselves, maybe none of those will produce noticeably sharper photographs, but when you start adding up a lot of these little things, you can definitely see a difference.

    Reply
  5. Alan Herning says

    May 6, 2012 at 2:03 am

    Tried it tonight in Sydney, Australia and I used my old Sigma 170-500mm f5-6.3 on my Pentax k7.
    Wow it was bright and at 1/30 sec f22 focal length 750 i am very happy with the result. Tripod mount, mirror lock-up and cable release.
    Thank you Steve for the heads up about this event. Your website is one of my very favourites.
    Keep up the good work.

    Reply

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