Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Super moon


This is a delayed post about the super moon. If you live in the southern hemisphere it happened on Sunday, 8 May. The experts tell us it was when the moon approached within 357,000km of Earth.

There's a bit of a background to my story, it goes something like this: The day before, at about 5.30pm I went for an evening walk which involved walking up Maungawhau (Mt Eden). When I got to the top I was rewarded with the most spectacular sunset; we'd been experiencing clear, blue skies for about a week. There were quite a few people up there, many with cameras set up on tripods. In the opposite side of the sky, the moon was already up – very big and round. It was really an impressive sight.

Naturally I thought it would be a nice family experience to take a dinner picnic up the mountain the following night to see the "super moon". Well Sunday turned out to be a pretty full-on day and we ended up racing the clock to get our picnic sorted to take up the mountain. It is worth noting that in the whole time we have been living in Auckland, we have driven up Maungawhau about two times, always opting to walk up. However, on this occasion, we decided that if were were going to catch the sunset we would have to drive up. With kids in car and picnic packed, we headed up. On the drive, Steve commented that he had never seen so many cars driving up; then we got to the top and got stuck in a grid lock. Steve graciously let us girls get out of the car with the picnic and attempted to turn the car around to park further down the mountain; but he wasn't going anywhere. I ended up re-directed the idiots who were still trying to turn into the top carpark. Event-u-ally, Steve managed to get the car down and join us for the picnic.

The sunset wasn't to thrilling as the sky had started to cloud over earlier in the day. When the sun did set however, the moon quickly rose in the other direction. Despite sharing the experience with a crowd and the stress of getting there, it really was worth seeing and turned out to be quite a pleasant night.








Other, possibly more impressive pictures of the super moon taken around the globe.

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