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Thursday, October 25th’s full moon was the Hunter’s Moon. It was also the closest and therefore biggest full moon of 2007.

Last Thursday’s moon was to be about 50,000 kilometers – or 30,000 miles – closer to the Earth than 2007’s most distant and smallest full moon, last April.

This October full moon is the Hunter’s Moon for the northern hemisphere. That’s the name for the full moon following the Harvest Moon in September. This October full Hunter’s Moon came at precisely 4:52 a.m. Universal Time Friday. For the continental U.S., that means the full moon came in the evening or around midnight Thursday night, when the moon was shining sky high.

At the same time – on the opposite side of the world in East Asia and Indonesia – this same full moon reached its peak at noontime Friday.

No matter where you live, all of you had the opportunity to see a large and full-looking moon all night on October 25th. You saw the moon rising in the east around sunset, highest in the sky around local midnight and setting in the west around sunrise.

Around the time of each full moon, the moon stays out all night long. That’s because, in order to appear full, the moon has to be opposite the sun.