# What would be the difference in distance between earth and moon on supermoon night (14 November 2016)

As we all know the usual distance between earth and moon is 384,400 km. But i was thinking how much closer it will be on 14 November 2016, as it will be a supermoon, the brightest and biggest moon in 60 years.

From where I am on Vancouver Island, western Canada, it will be around 356,500 km.

Based on some information from this article

http://www.space.com/34515-supermoon-guide.html

The Nov 14 2016 supermooon's expected peak of full phase is on the morning ov Nov 14 at 8:52 AM EST

According to some quick calculations that I performed using PyEphem

and assuming the moon would be viewed by an observer in NYC at 08:52AM EST

0.00236372323707 AU from observer An AU is 1.5 * 10^km

Edit: I needed a better precision for km to AU

http://www.iau.org/static/resolutions/IAU2012_English.pdf

According to this, the AU can be more precisely defined as 149 597 870 700 meters +/- 3 meters

0.00236372323707 * 149 597 870 700 =

353 607 963.19 meters or

~ 353,608 km from earth

here is a quick run through of the inputs I used for the program

>>> moon = ephem.Moon()
>>> nyc = ephem.Observer()
>>> nyc.long, nyc.lat = '-74.0059', '40.7127'
>>> nyc.date = '2016/11/14 08:52:00'
>>> moon.compute(nyc)
>>> print moon.earth_distance

0.00236372323707