I am all in favour of using marketing techniques to improve science education. But the garbage that has been talked about the so-called “supermoon” really is shaming: scientists who popularised this idea plainly did not bother too much with the mundane, such as the fact that we are that close to the Moon every 28 days.
Read the guff in the HuffPost below for an example of how people have been left misinformed. (NB as one of the bloggers linked to below seems not to know what HuffPost means, mea culpa, it is the “Huffington Post” article linked to below – I am not making a general criticism of the articles linked here, but of that specific one)
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cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 
4 responses to “The rubbish written about the “supermoon””
There is NOTHING in my post about the “Supermoon” that is incorrect or as you said, “guff” and if you would have read correctly, you would have picked up facts instead of fiction. As stated in my post, “The largest and brightest full moon in 18 years, dubbed “Supermoon” because it is at its closest point as it orbits the Earth. Just at 221,565 miles from Earth, the Supermoon appeared to be 14% larger and 30% brighter than the typical full moon observed by us on Earth.” This phenomenon occurs every 18 years.
Did you write the Huffington Post piece then? Not that I can see. You should maybe reread my blog before commenting on it.
That (HuffPost) says ” the moon made its closest encounter to Earth since 1993.” Plainly that is not true as the Moon orbits the Earth every 28 days so is this close every 28 days.
I haven’t criticised your piece or any of the others linked. Though I would say that you could have made it clearer that the Perigee occurs every 28 days, not every 18 years or so. But I am not saying and nor have I said there was anything wrong in your post.
I apologize for misreading your post, and I hope I didn’t offend. I agree that there are many that are misinformed regarding the facts about the “supermoon,” and thanks to media, such as NBC, that mistakenly reported that the actual distance between the Earth and moon are at a closer point during this Super Perigee Moon is at its closest point during the 18-year phenomenon, and it only happens to be at that particular distance every 18 years.
My brother Matt is a programmer, and builds computers and I’m sure he would really like your blog, so I’m going to share the link with him. Linux, PHP, MySQL, etc. are his things.
No problem.