Did you get a chance to see this year’s “Supermoon“? Still
confused as to what was so super about it, anyhow? Simply, the
supermoon is the colloquial name for what is scientifically
referred to as the perigee-syzygy moon. “The … what”, you ask?
Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. The Moon
orbits our Earth, not in a perfect circle, but in an ellipse. As
a consequence of this, there are times the Moon is closer to the
Earth and times it is further away. For any object orbiting the
Earth, the part of its orbit that takes it furthest from our
planet is called apogee. The closest point, perigee. So now that
we have perigee out of the way, “what was that other funny word
again?” A syzygy, (pronounced, Sizz-ih-gee), is a term used to
refer to an astronomical event in which 3 celestial bodies form
a straight line. In our case with the Moon, the bodies are the
Sun, the Earth, and the Moon. You’re probably realizing that the
Sun-Earth-Moon system experiences two syzygies each month; we
call them the New