21 striking photos of the largest supermoon in nearly 70 years

Reuters

Early Monday morning — or evening, depending on where you live — the largest full moon of the year, called the supermoon, shined its biggest and brightest in nearly 70 years.

Size is relative though. The November 14 supermoon was about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than its smallest apparent size, called a micromoon.

That's because the moon's 27-day, 7-hour, 43-minute orbit around the Earth isn't a perfect circle, but an ellipse. You get a closer point to Earth, or perigee, and a more distant point, or apogee.

The moon's apogee this month is about 252,000 miles away, and on Monday its perigee was about 222,000 miles away.

Here's what this apparent size change looks like over the course of the year:

On Monday, it so happened that the Earth, moon, and sun lined up in such a way to make the supermoon a little bit brighter and bigger than usual. As NASA explains, the next supermoon of this kind technically won't happen until November 25, 2034.

Technicalities aside, though, photographers from around the world showed up to take some beautiful photos and videos of the supermoon.

Here are 22 of the best shots we can verify aren't fake (and boy, are there some fake ones making the rounds).

Beijing, China

Glastonbury, England

New York, New York