Spooky supermoon next weekend will be the biggest in 70 years

"When a moon hits your eye like an extra-large pizza pie".

The full moon gets even fuller 10 days from today, and it will be the biggest it has been in almost 70 years. And the next comparable one will not occur until November 2034.

The so-called supermoon that will take place on November 14 will be the closest that the full-phase moon has been to Earth since 1948. The luminous satellite will appear about 14 percent larger and upwards of 30 percent brighter than your run-of-the-mill full moon (no word yet on whether werewolves will be that much bigger or harder to kill).

Astronomers refer to this phenomenon as a perigee-syzygy (sorry, Scrabble fans, there are only two "y" tiles). Our moon's perigee is the point in its elliptical orbit around the Earth when it is closest (its apogee is when it is the farthest away). The syzygy occurs when the sun, moon, and Earth line up.

Although there can be as many as six supermoons in a year (indeed, there was one just last month), this one is special because it will be the closest in several decades at the technical point of perigee and full moon combined (the perigee is only about 90 minutes away from the instant of full phase).

For this year and month, the distance between apogee and perigee is about 50,000 kilometres. That seems like a lot, but the moon, at its closest, will still be 356,509 kilometres distant.

For those of us looking out that night in the Pacific time zone, that full-moon crest will happen at 5:52 a.m. Because that is around sunrise time (and either a bit late to stay up or really early to wake up for some), get your visual fill (and telephoto pics) the evening before or after (cloud cover will be the wild card in this cosmic event). The effect will only be negligibly diminished by the few hours' difference, and the evening of the 13th is also better because this is when the moon will be closest to full in western North America.