The Science Centre Observatory said sky gazers can look forward to three other supermoons this year.- ST
SINGAPORE (The Straits Times/Asia News Network): Hesham Suleyman was all excited about catching the supermoon on Monday (July 3) evening, although he was prepared to be disappointed, given the cloudy sky.
“I was hoping to catch the supermoon today. However, it is a cloudy day with 100 per cent cloud cover, so I don’t expect a clear supermoon, or I may not get a chance to see it at all,” the 48-year-old civil servant told The Straits Times.
But his spirits quickly lifted when he saw the supermoon, or the buck moon, poke through the clouds at around 8pm from the kitchen window of his Tampines flat.
“I was delighted when it appeared, even though it was brief,” he said, adding that he quickly captured the moment with his Samsung S22 Ultra.
Monday’s supermoon was the first of four to grace the sky this year. A supermoon is a full moon that orbits closest to Earth, making it appear larger and brighter than usual.
Another resident, Quek Song Chye, said the weather on Monday was not as ideal for moon-gazing as last year, when he had a good view of the supermoon in August.
“I started waiting for the moon to rise from 6.30pm, and by 7.09pm, (there was) still no sight of the moon because of the low clouds blocking it,” said the 59-year-old clinic manager.
“Eventually, the moon came out at 7.28pm,” he said, adding that he had just about 15 minutes to snap some pictures from the staircase of a Pasir Ris flat, before the moon hid behind the cloud again.
Bryan Ho captured the supermoon with the Ayer Rajah Telephone Exchange building in the foreground from an HDB block in Clementi at 7.13pm.
The 37-year-old said he started taking pictures of the moon in 2018, and would always plan his shoots in advance.
“I usually coordinate with a few others to plan, recce and check out locations before we gather on that day to photograph the moon together,” said Ho, who previously worked in product marketing for digital imaging.
“But today I was alone except with a couple of friends who just came to watch as everyone else was busy, or thought that it was too cloudy to photograph the supermoon,” he said.
Civil servant Fiona Tan was at home with her family when she saw the supermoon from the balcony of her flat in Punggol.
“(I was) pretty excited, although it is not the first time I spotted the supermoon from my place,” said Tan, who is in her 40s.
Senior manager Ivan Lee, 47, also managed to snap a few pictures of the supermoon with his Nikon P900 from the top storey of a multi-storey carpark near his HDB block in Redhill.
Other than Monday’s buck moon, the Science Centre Observatory said sky gazers can look forward to three other supermoons this year.
These are the sturgeon moon on Aug 1, the blue moon on Aug 31, and the harvest moon on Sept 29.
