The Morning After the "Supermoon" Before

I've been having some thoughts about the term "Supermoon", as applied by some astronomers and excitable pseudoscience journalists to the full moon nearest the moon's closest approach to earth. (If I've got this right - it's always tricky to decode journalist science and scientific journalism).

So it strikes me we need a better word than "Supermoon" to describe this marginally large and indistinguishably brighter moon. I'd suggest "moon". Or, if you want to get all over-excited, "full moon".

I guess to the dwellers of the Cities on the Plain, with their neon and their sodium light pollution, a full moon is "dramatic". But out here in the sticks - even with the M1 one side and the glow of Milton Keynes off to the North-west - it's pretty obvious that the full moon is, relatively speaking and ironically, quite a dull thing.

The full moon is too bright - almost mercilessly so. In a dark sky it's almost dazzling. The physical features are almost washed out.

Now a first crescent is exciting, with its promise of things to come. But best for me is a moon at first or third quarter. With the sun's light sweeping across the face, the craters and mountains shed long shadows and the edges are accentuated. That's the time to grab your bins and point them skywards. It's a time of dark rumours and fuzzy borders, not just the happy, smiling man in the moon - and yet a time of definition and clarity. That's what the moon is for. To remind us that life is mysterious, and some truth can only be found in shadows.

So I'll keep the crescent. You can have the whole of the moon.