Saturday night will give lunar enthusiasts a special treat: a supermoon.
While the moon stays the same size, its relative position to Earth can change. This particularly large and bright full moon can appear 12% to 14% larger and shine brighter because it is slightly closer than normal.
And the discoverer of the blood moons phenomenon, Pastor Mark Biltz, author of “Blood Moons” and the inspiration for a documentary movie of the same name, sees a connection to the “signs in the sun, moon and stars” promised in the Bible.
The moon will be at its perigee (closest approach to Earth) on Saturday night. The lunar body reaches a perigee every time it completes its elliptical orbit around the earth – about every 27 days – but a supermoon only happens when two events line up: the perigee, and a full moon. This happens between three and four times a year.
According to Space.com, the moon will be fullest at exactly 2:35 p.m. ET on Saturday, Aug. 29 and reach perigee the next day, about 20 hours later, at 11 a.m. ET on Sunday, Aug. 30.
See the wide selection of Blood Moon items in the WND Superstore!
Unlike solar eclipses and other celestial treats, Supermoons occur every 13 months and 18 days.
Commenting on last summers’ trio of Supermoons, Blitz, who discovered the blood moon tetrad occurring in 2014 and 2015 coincides with Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles in those successive years, noted: “Amazingly, according to the biblical calendar months these fall in the month of Tammuz when Israel worshiped the golden calf, the month of Av, when the 10 spies brought the evil report and when the Temple was destroyed twice on the same day, and the month of Elul, which is the month of repentance.”
“There is also added significance as it precedes a Shemitah year, or the seventh year of the seven-year cycle beginning this Rosh Hashanah. Next year, it happens again!”
Biltz, of El Shaddai Ministries in Tacoma, Washington, points out that in Genesis, God said He created the sun and the moon for signals about coming events.
“Are we watching?” he asked.
The brilliance of a supermoon is determined by how closely the perigee and the fullest point coincide. Additionally, the perigee is not a concrete number and changes every lunar orbit. The distance moon is to Earth at its perigee for one orbit can be somewhat smaller or larger than during another orbit.
Saturday’s supermoon is the first of three such consecutive events. Called the Sturgeon Moon, it is the last full moon of summer.
The Harvest Moon on Sept. 27 will be the most dramatic event. September’s lunar perigee is special because it’s the closest perigee of the entire year, termed the “proxigee.” It will also coincide with a lunar eclipse to bring what is called a Blood Moon.
One more supermoon follows on Oct. 27, but it will be slightly more distant than the previous two.
