Apparent Sizes of Sun and Moon near Apogee and Perigee

on Thursday, May 13, 2021
This image shows the apparent size of the two largest celestial bodies in our sky- the sun and the moon. Two dates were chosen based on the size of the full moon.

30th December 2020: On this day, we saw a "micro" moon, when the moon was near its Apogee. An image of the sun from the same day shows its relative size against the moon. The sun, on this date was nearing its Perigee (solar perigee was only 3 days later, in 2nd January 2021).

27th April 2021: This time, we see a "super" moon near its Perigee while the sun is approaching towards Apogee (solar apogee on 5-6th July 2021).

It is interesting to see that the moon near its perigee appears larger than the sun near its perigee (around 1 arcminute larger in the sky).

Some more details (distance from earth, angular diameter) are annotated in the image.

All the images were taken with the same equipment at a focal length of 600mm. Stacked 85% of 240 images for both the lunar images and the solar images are single captures with a white-light solar filter.
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