If you were trying to come up with an image that summed up everything beautiful about space exploration, it would be hard to beat this NASA video of the Nov. 14 supermoon rising behind the Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
A supermoon occurs when the moon is full while at perigee, or the closest it comes to Earth in its elliptical orbit. The moon appears larger and brighter, casting as much as 30 percent more moonlight than when the moon is at its furthest from Earth, or apogee. Some perigee approaches are closer than others—the Nov. 14 supermoon represented the closest the lunar body had come to Earth while full since 1948, and will remain so until 2034.
It certainly made for an impressive show. In the video, the deep-red moon rises behind the Soyuz capsule, shifting through an autumnal spectrum of red, orange, and finally yellow as it grows huge in the sky in the time-lapse footage.
Perhaps that moonrise was a good omen. Baikonur Cosmodrome is the site from which both Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin rocketed into history, and on Nov. 17, it launched another record: U.S. Astronaut Peggy Whitson, riding the Soyuz to the International Space Station became, at 56, the oldest woman to fly in space.
