In the next few days you have the opportunity to take one of the photos of the moon to make a montage just like this one:

Unfortunately, good things take time so you’ll have to wait until 7th July 2009 take the other one.

The moon is in an elliptical orbit around earth. Because of this, the distance between earth and the moon differs by approximately 50,000 Km (31,000 miles).

The point farthest from earth is called Apogee and is around 406,000 Km and the point closest, called Perigee is around 358,000 Km away.

At lunar perigee the moon will appear to be around 12% larger compared with lunar apogee.

You can get a list of dates for the Lunar apogee and perigee for a given year from http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/pacalc.html. You should see that the 12th December this year is a full moon at perigee.

Lets jump to the chase…

Take a photo of the full moon this Friday (12th December) at a known zoom and put the photo to the side somewhere safe, then on the 7th July 2009 you should take the other one.

Both of these dates are full moons. This friday will result in the larger of the two images while the one in July 2009 will be the smaller one.

Enjoy.