Full moon after 37 years

Merry Christmas

Christmas revellers have something more to cheer about this year. Apart from the festivities they would be able to bask under the full moon this Christmas. This is the first time since 1977 that a full moon would be visible.

Christmas revellers have something more to cheer about this year. Apart from the festivities they would be able to bask under the full moon this Christmas. This is the first time since 1977 that a full moon would be visible.

The Vyomanaut Astronomy Club of St Ann’s Girls School, Vijaynagar Colony, here conducted a simulation programme, to create awareness on the spectacle. The students took print outs of the full moon days and manually checked the phenomenon.

Mahitha, a student, who was part of the study, said that local coordinates were fed into the simulation data as per Indian Standard time and a simulator run was conducted. N Sri Raghunandan Kumar, director, Planetary Society, India said, “Such studies are common in the western world.

Once the students received an alert about December 25 full moon they got excited and conducted simulation runs for last 200 years.” The data for the full moons in the last century was sourced from NASA website. The students who conducted the study include Mahitha, Amrutha, Nissie, Shanti, Pranita, Lithika and Saryu. The students were assisted by the Planetary Society, India.