The night sky will witness two celestial shows within just days as the last supermoon of 2022 shines its brightest and largest light Thursday.
Thursday's "Sturgeon Moon" gets its name from the Maine Farmer's Almanac, which began publishing Native American names for full moons in the 1930s.
The Algonquin tribe named this August full moon 'Sturgeon Moon' after the large fish that were caught with much ease during that time.
But this particular full moon shares the spotlight with Perseids, one of the best meteor showers of this year. Unfortunately, the full moon's bright light could outshine and make it harder to witness the Perseid showers as they peak late Friday into early Saturday morning.
"The show's gonna be a bit muted, but still, there's enough bright meteors that you can still see enough activity by just facing away from the moon," said American Meteor Society editor Robert Lunsford.
According to NASA's website, the moon will maintain a full-like appearance for about three days until Saturday morning.
The moon's orbit around the earth is an ellipse, not a perfect circle. A full moon is considered a supermoon when it comes within 90% of perigee, its closest point to Earth.
According to NASA, the closest supermoons appear "about 17 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter" than the furthest, faintest moon of the year.
That 17% isn't actually enough to make the moon look noticeably bigger, but NASA says supermoons are still a bit brighter than other full moons.
The perigee is about 226,000 miles from Earth — about 25,000 miles closer than the moon's furthest point.
While it's popularly used to describe the closest full moons, "supermoon" isn't an official astronomical term. In fact, it was coined by an astrologer in 1979.