Tonight’s (April 7) full moon is special because it occurs when the moon is close to perigee, the point in its orbit where it is closest to Earth.^1,2 This event is called a perigee-syzygy by astronomers, but it is informally known as a supermoon. Because the moon is a little closer than normal, it will be a little larger in the sky than normal.

Around three thousand years, King David wrote,

The starry night sky is a good reminder of God’s greatness and power.

For northern-hemisphere families in isolation due to the coronavirus pandemic, a recently discovered comet may provide some needed diversion.¹ This comet is dubbed ATLAS after the Hawaiian organization that discovered it: the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert system. The comet is barely bright enough to be seen with binoculars under dark sky conditions.²

A recent news article¹ reported that certain types of stars² in our Milky Way Galaxy have more lithium (Li) in their stellar atmosphere than the current models predict.

Astronomers recently detected an enormous but short-lived increase in radiation from the nearby star Proxima Centauri.^1,2 This radiation burst, known as a flare, caused the star to become a thousand times brighter for ten seconds. Our sun also has flares, but those flares are much smaller.