A Supermoon in Cusco

Our term in Cusco is slowly coming to an end, but not before we were allowed to witness an astronomical phenomenon that would next occur in 2036; the supermoon. A super moon occurs when the perigee of the moon’s orbit, so the point it is closest to earth, coincides with a full moon. The moon is around 55,000km closer than at its apogee, and appears up to 14% bigger than it usually is. During the Sunset of the 13th of November, I was able to take a couple nice photos of the moon with an orange/red sky and a bit of Cusco in the foreground.

The city itself was also dipped into quite a nice, reddish light, which would’ve made for some nice photos. But as I was back home at the res, I wasn’t really able to see much of the city.

And then the sun set and the moon was so high over the horizon, that it could have just as well been any (nearly) full moon. Not to say that the moon isn’t always a nice photo motive anyway.

The next evening, on Monday, one of our student life members organized a trip to photograph the supermoon. She had found a spot on google street view with a good view towards the rising moon. We were supposed to walk there, but underestimated the distance and then decided to take taxis so we wouldn’t be too late. It took a while until the taxi drivers got where we wanted to go, and in the process we passed by the same square three times.

When we got there, it turned out that meanwhile a wall had been built where we wanted to take the photos, but there was a makeshift “door” in it, so we simply decided to go through it. By now it was pitch dark. Behind the door was about one and a half meters of dirt / trash dump site, and then a 200m deep canyon. We decided to set up our cameras there anyway, and had a great view on the rising supermoon. Unfortunately, my tripod was shaky so most of my photos were useless and since it wasn’t as bright as the day before, there was nothing really to be seen in the foreground as size comparison.

This and more stories were originally published on www.myredsuitcase.com .