Tonight's full moon is going to be the closest, biggest, and brightest of 2025.
Known as the Beaver Moon, this full moon rises just 221,818 miles (356,980 kilometers) from Earth - close enough to qualify as a supermoon.
Because it's at perigee, the point in its orbit where it comes closest to Earth, the moon looks unusually large and luminous in the sky. If you step outside just after sunset, you'll likely notice it looks bigger than usual - and it is.
The Beaver Moon gets its name from traditional North American sources, marking the season when beavers prepare for winter and trappers set their last lines before the freeze. It's long been a symbol of seasonal change and survival.
Supermoons can look up to 14% larger and nearly 30% brighter than a typical full moon, especially when low on the horizon. That's also when the "moon illusion" kicks in, making the moon appear enormous compared to objects on the ground.
It's the third and final supermoon of 2025. And the conditions tonight - cold, crisp autumn air and early sunset - make for perfect viewing. Clouds permitting.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
