The Conversation (0)
News
Picture:
Matt Cardy/Getty Images
On Monday, the glorious ''supermoon'' came to populate news feeds all over the world. The one problem is most of those 'amazing photos' weren't all they seemed.
The last 'supermoon' was 1948, and the next one will be in 2034.
The moon becomes 'super' when a full moon coincides with a point in its orbit when it is closer to Earth.
The celestial body known as 'the moon' (Earth also has multiple 'near earth objects') has an elliptical orbit around the earth, and therefore its distance and relative size in the night sky changes.
Photographers with a long telephoto lens standing at a certain distance from their chosen landmark were able to show you what you hoped it might look like.
Picture:
Picture:
Picture:
Yet to the naked eye it's not as impressive, and some of these Instagram posts captured the unexpected scale.
It happens because although the moon will appear 14 per cent larger, this happens over the course of a month so the effect is less immediate and the moon less imposing.
But they were wrong. They weren't looking at the real 'supermoon'.
Somehow they missed what these folks saw, and they weren't using any fancy photography techniques.
Amazing.
So beautiful.
Wait a minute. Something's wrong here.
Where's the American flag? And the Apollo landing craft?
Clearly the moon landing was faked. Case closed.
More: Conspiracy theorists think this hand signal proves Donald Trump is in the Illuminati
Top 100
