Tonight is a chance for you to see the biggest and brightest moon in this year. It will be called the Wolf Moon which is a name rooted from the Native American culture. According to Spaceweather.com, the wolf moon will be about 14 percent wider and 30 percent brighter than a full moon we often see in the sky.
It is completely possible to explain this phenomenon. The moon's orbit around the Earth is not a circle but an ellipse, with one side 31,070 miles (50,000 km) closer to Earth than the other. The closest point that the moon reaches to the Earth called perigee.
Besides that, the Mars will be close to the full moon tonight. It looks as a reddish, star-like object.
It is thought that full moon is the reason for unlucky things as well as strange behavior of animal and human beings. Some researchers has tried to prove the connection between this phenomenon and births, heart attacks, deaths, suicides, violence, psychiatric hospital admissions and epileptic seizures, etc. A full moon makes ocean tides higher, beaches more polluted.
On the other hands, some people think that full moon actually does not exist. The full moon occurs when the sun, Earth and the moon are all almost lined up. If they're perfectly aligned, Earth casts a shadow on the moon and there's a total lunar eclipse. So what we call a full moon, the moon's face is actually slightly less than 100 percent illuminated.
Right after sunset, along the horizon, the moon tends to seem bigger. But this is really just an illusion. You can prove this by two photos of the moon, with a digital camera or your cell phone, when the moon is near the horizon and later when it's higher in the sky. After that, you can compare its size at two moments. Until now, the truth about full moon still is a secret.
