We had an opportunity to view the first full moon of 2010 here in Mazatlan on Friday, January 29th. It was the biggest and brightest full moon of the year and we were even able to easily see features on the moon with our telescope. See our photos below.
This full moon is also known as the wolf moon, dating back to Native American culture and the notion that hungry wolves howled at the full moon on cold winter nights. Each month brings another full moon name. Here are some interesting facts about our moon.
The moon is, on average, 238,855 miles (384,400 km) from Earth. The moon's orbit around Earth - which causes it to go through all its phases once every 29.5 days - is not a perfect circle, but rather an ellipse. One side of the orbit is 31,070 miles (50,000 km) closer than the other. So in each orbit, the moon reaches this closest point to us, called perigee. Once or twice a year, perigee coincides with a full moon, as it did last night, making the moon bigger and brighter than any other full moons during the year. It was about 14 percent wider and 30 percent brighter than lesser full Moons of the year, according to Spaceweather.com.
As a bonus, we could even see Mars just to the left of the moon. With our eye it just looked like a bright star but with our telescope it was a reddish, star-like object.
Enjoy the pictures we took of the Moon rising over the Sierra Madre Mountains here in Mexico.
This is a zoomed in photo of the Moon rising.
As the moon rose higher in the east and the sun sat in the west, the sky began to turn shades of pink.
This is the sunset in the West as the Moon rose.
Photo of the lights for as far as you can see lining the malecon for Carnaval approaching Feb 11-16.
These photos were taken at 5:00 am this morning. They didn't turn out very good but you can get an idea of how bright the moon was, lighting up the ocean.
