Blue Supermoon: Exactly When And Where To Watch It Live Online

Sep 02, 2023

The supermoon rises behind Glastonbury Tor on September 27, 2015 in Glastonbury, England. (Photo by ... [+] Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

You may know all about the “Blue Supermoon,” from where and when to watch it with your own eyes, when it will be at its biggest and how to photograph it with your smartphone, but what if it’s cloudy where you are at the crucial time?

Although the rising and setting full moon is a monthly highlight for sky-watchers, it’s rarely, if ever, streamed live. That changes this month as The Virtual Telescope Project—a team of outreach astronomers in Italy led by astronomer Gianluca Masi—will stream the action live at a convenient time for North Americans to watch on YouTube.

The live feed is scheduled for 03:30 UTC on Thursday, August 31, which is 5:30 a.m. CEST (local time in Rome), 11:30 p.m. EDT and 8:30 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, August 30.

The Virtual Telescope Project will be screening not the rising of the “Super Blue Moon,” but its setting.

The best time to look at the full moon isn’t when it’s high in the sky, but as it rises or sets in civil twilight. In practice that means when it rises or sets within about 10 minutes or so of the sunset or sunrise.

That’s exactly what will happen in Rome on the morning of August 31, making this the ideal opportunity to stream it live. In Rome the sun will rise at 6:34 a.m. CEST and the moon will set at 6:40 a.m. CEST, so there should be gorgeous shots of our natural satellite close to the southwestern horizon.

You’ll also see a bright light just above it, the setting moon. Saturn, the “ringed planet,” is just past its bright opposition, a point in Earth’s orbit when it’s between the sun and the planet. Saturn is therefore as close, as bright and as fully lit as it ever gets.

The celestial sight comes as India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission’s Pragyan rover is exploring the moon’s south polar region, the first ever to do so. On Aug. 23, India became only the fourth nation to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the surface of the moon after the U.S., China and the U.S.S.R.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.