Stargazers across the UK are set to catch a glimpse of a bigger and brighter supermoon on Wednesday night. July’s full moon is known as the Buck Moon because male deer shed and regrow their antlers around this time of year.
The name came from a Native American system which uses the different months’ full moons as a calendar to keep track of the seasons, said Anna Ross, a planetarium astronomer at Royal Museums Greenwich, in south-east London. She said: “The best time to view this supermoon will be any time during the night of the 13th July, when the moon will rise in the east just after sunset, and set in the west a little before sunrise.
“There is no particular location you need to be to observe this event as this is a bright full moon. As long as the night is clear of clouds it will be easy to spot whether you are in a light-polluted city or a dark area of countryside.” She said a supermoon is the result of a full moon occurring when it is near its closest point to the Earth in its orbit.
