Supermoon Pictures: Best Shots of Year's Biggest Full Moon

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Poseidon's Supermoon

Photograph by Anthony Ayiomamitis, TWAN

The supermoon hangs heavy over the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion, south of Athens, around twilight on Saturday evening.
Due to the moon's egg-shaped orbit, our natural satellite is at perigee—its closest approach to Earth—about once a month.  The term "supermoon" was coined in 1979 to describe a full moon that coincides with perigee. (Apogee, when the moon is farthest from us, also occurs on a roughly monthly schedule.)
At its closest on Saturday, the moon was 221,801 miles (356,955 kilometers) from our planet—and just minutes away from of the official full moon phase, at 11:35 p.m. ET.
"As a consequence, this translates into it appearing as much as 16 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than other full moons of 2012—not a huge amount, but definitely noticeable," said Geza Gyuk, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.