The New Moon will be in the closest proximity to Earth on January 21, 2023, since the Middle Ages. Reportedly, this astronomical event is occurring for the first time in 993 years and is most likely to reoccur after another 345 years.
Due to its closeness to the Earth, the New Moon will be in its biggest appearance in the sky since December 3, 1030, CE. ‘Timeanddate.com’ has revealed the information after a review from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA. Today, the moon will be 356,568 kilometres or 221,561 miles from Earth. Those who will miss the incident today will have to wait till January 20, 2368, to experience it.
As reported by Timeanddate.com, that’s the closest it will come to our planet since the year 1030—a time of the Crusades, the Norman Conquest of Britain and early Vikings settlements in North America, a century ironically sometimes called the “Dark Ages.”
This “ultimate supermoon” also signals the beginning of Chinese Lunar New Year and comes during a rare conjunction between Venus and Saturn that will be best viewed just after sunset in the southwest on Sunday, January 22, 2022.
This uniqueness of this weekend’s apogee New Moon was noticed by Astrophysicist & Science Communicator Graham Jones at Timeanddate.com, who looked into the closest Earth-Moon distances at New Moon over a 2,000-year period. He discovered three New Moons where the distance was less than 356,570 km in 1030, this weekend and in 2368.
That makes this weekend’s New Moon the closest since 1030 and the closest in a period of 1,337 years.