Tuesday’s Supermoon: Will Tampa Bay Area Weather Cooperate?

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — Stargazers across the country are in for a treat Tuesday when a supermoon is expected to brighten the night sky. Sadly, the moon’s peak is expected to arrive roughly around the same time the generally prolific Geminid meteor shower makes its appearance.

Tampa Bay area residents may find the nighttime show muted even more courtesy of partly cloudy conditions anticipated by the National Weather Service during the overnight hours Dec. 13. For those who try to get a sneak peek on Monday night, the viewing could be obscured even more thanks to mostly cloudy conditions and anticipated patchy fog.

Tuesday night, however, may not be a total washout for those patient enough to keep an eye on the skies. The supermoon will be out all night, subduing the Geminids, which can produce up to 120 meteors per hour. According to a statement from NASA, the supermoon will reduce visibility of the Geminids “five to ten fold,” so you’re likely to see only about a dozen shooting stars per hour.

But don’t be too dismayed.

There’s another meteor shower this month, the Ursids, which peak Thursday, Dec. 22. This little shower often goes unnoticed. Produced by the dust grains left behind by the comet Tuttle, it produces only about five to 10 meteors an hour. The shower runs from Dec. 17-25, and the moon will be 23 days old at the time of peak activity, so it shouldn’t present too much of a problem.

The Dec. 13 supermoon completes a trifecta of moons that appear larger and brighter than regular full moons. The supermoon will reach its peak fullness at 7:05 p.m. Eastern Time on Dec. 13 but will appear full to the untrained eye on Monday, Dec. 12.

The moon's orbit around Earth isn't a perfect circle. It's more oval- or egg-shaped, meaning the moon is continuously getting closer or farther away from us.

The moon's closest point to Earth is called "perigee," which is about 30,000 miles closer than the opposite, "apogee." When perigee lines up with the cycle of a full moon, it's known as a supermoon.

Supermoons can appear to be about 14 percent bigger in the sky and 30 percent brighter. But the exact moments of a full moon and perigee hardly ever line up simultaneously. So the supermoons can vary slightly in size.

The November supermoon appeared larger than any in 70 years, and it won’t look that big again until Nov. 25, 2034.

With reporting by Patch’s Beth Dalby and Marc Torrence

Image via Biswarup Ganguly, used under Creative Commons