Supermoon 2012

Saturday night I got out my rather antiquated tripod and went to the backyard to try various camera settings, in an attempt to capture a photo of the Supermoon of 2012. Here, from space.com, is a simple explanation of the phenomenon, in case you missed hearing about it on the news.

"Because of a fluke of orbital timing, the full moon of May peaked late Saturday just as the moon was passing its perigee, the closest point to Earth of its orbit. The result was the biggest full moon of the year, which NASA and other scientists nicknamed the supermoon of 2012." 

Sadly, we had a lot of humidity in the air, so the pictures I got were not as sharp as I'd hoped for. Also, I was only able to shoot it while it was near the horizon. Once it got much higher, it went behind clouds and never reappeared. But here are three of my better ones. The first picture, which shows a red/orange tint is what it actually looked like when it first came over the horizon. It lost that color as it rose in the sky.