** Caution: EXTERNAL Sender ** Tonight's full moon is what has come to be known as a "supermoon," denoting when a full moon rises near its perigee to the earth. The moon thus appears to be larger.
I was delighted to see that the Fox News cable coverage of the event included a diagram showing the distance of the moon at perigee and apogee, giving the distances in kilometers. Unfortunately, metric is infrequently used in the press for astronomical units, even though astronomy is a completely metricated field, like all the sciences. Even the two leading astronomical popular magazines (Sky & Telescope, Astronomy) are only partially metricated. As an amateur astronomer of many years, I have been particularly disappointed to see how many astronomers have sold out to the "translation" of astronomical units into legacy units because they thing that they are doing the public a service. They aren't. They are simply prolonging public ignorance. _______________________________________________ USMA mailing list [email protected] https://lists.colostate.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/usma
