Well, you won’t be able to see this astronomical event, but today’s moon reaches conjunction with the sun (the technical definition of “new moon”) remarkably close to when it reaches perigee (that point in its orbit when it is closest to Earth). Officially scheduled for 3:56 p.m. EDT, the moon’s new phase will occur only 7 hours after it reaches the second-closest perigee of the year, at 357 050 km distance.
This event is somewhat the inverse of March’s much-hyped “supermoon,” when lunar opposition (the technical definition of “full moon”) arrived almost exactly (well, within an hour) at the same time as the closest perigee of the year (356 577 km).
As with the super-full moon in March, nothing is expected to happen at today’s super-new moon. Tides will be a bit higher than average, as they are every month near full and new moon (when the gravitational pull of the sun and moon combine to produce the “spring tide” effect, rather than work at 90° to each other producing a “neap tide”), but that is all:
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