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In the previous thread, Rommel Miller wrote:
"But get this, the guy who coined the term "Super-moon" Richard Nolle (1979) is nothing more than a garden variety ASTROLOGER, again, a charlatan and huckster of sorts, and a purveyor in hype. Super-moons are bunk"

Some more details for you. First, the astrologer who coined the expression "supermoon" does not own it. It has entered wide use in English (and English ONLY), and its meaning is determined by the way that people choose to use it. It's an expression that astronomy has no real use for, but it has popular appeal. Second although Nolle coined the term in 1979, he was very nearly the only person on the planet who used until March of 2011. By that standard, it was not a "word" --not a component of the language, but merely someone's pet terminology. This is easily verified by various types of archive searches (for example, visit the "Google Trends" web site). The small community of astrologers who paid attention to Nolle also occasionally talked about supermoons over the past couple of decades, but they were numbered in the dozens or perhaps a hundred worldwide.

In the winter of 2011, a bizarre and tragic coincidence occurred. The popular web site space.com (or one of its sister site's, like livescience.com) ran a little article talking about how an upcoming "supermoon" might cause earthquakes according to "some astrologer" (Nolle). Now Nolle has been making such predictions based on a weird melange of astrology and tidal anecdote for decades. No one paid much attention except his small band of followers. And what happens when you make the same prediction for long enough? Of course, eventually you will be right! And just after this story was published online, that devastating earthquake/tsunami/meltdown struck Japan. And suddenly the Internet went nuts over the idea of the "supermoon". If you check "History" page for the Wikipedia article on the topic of "supermoon" you will find that it was born within 24 hours of the earthquake. It really was an amazing coincidence that an article about Nolle's daft ideas was published just days before the earthquake. Naturally, it is very easy to show that there is no statistical link between major earthquakes and tide-generating forces, perigee-enhanced or not. It's not a completely outlandish hypothesis (small quakes show a modest correlation with tidal stress), it simply happens that the evidence does not support it.

Meanwhile, in another mad scientist's laboratory, the editors at "Sky & Telescope" were in the midst of preparing an article talking about an unusually close perigee in January 1912 that occurred "within minutes" of the defined instant of the phase of Full Moon. The title "Did the Moon Sink the Titanic" was splashed across the cover of their April 2012 issue (which was, of course, the centennial of the sinking of Titanic), written by Texas State University astronomer-physicist Donald Olson and collaborators. Olson et al. proposed a model connecting the slightly unusual tides that would have occurred in January 2012 with the sinking of the Titanic (supposedly those high tides could have freed grounded bergs from the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland "filling" the North Atlantic with danger). This was an equally bizarre theory, maybe even more than the astrologer's Supermoon. The disproof of their model is simple: use some typical tidal harmonic constants for those Atlantic coasts of Canada, get the proper tidal driving forces for 1912, and you can show that there was nothing out of the ordinary beyond normal Spring tides. It gets better...

Both the astronomer, Donald Olson, and the astrologer, Richard Nolle, have informed us of their source, their guru, their leader in the world of tidal insanity. His name was Fergus Wood. There's even a little photo of him in that article in Sky & Telescope. Wood compiled a very peculiar book, titled "Perigean Spring Tides", back in 1977 (Nolle coined his word "Supermoon" literally right after reading it). It's a huge tome, but it's bizarre. It's the man's obsession rendered into paper. Many of its pages look like science including pages and pages of series for computing the Moon's ecliptic latitude and longitude, and because the topic of tidal calculations was such voodoo back then, known and understood by only a small community of specialists, he was able to sell a model that suggested that practically any event that occurred near a perigee spring tide was CAUSED by that perigee spring tide. But there's little in it that makes any real sense as science. Most of his voluminous evidence is just a collection of news stories cherry-picked for his model. Furthermore, Fergus Wood apparently did not understand tidal harmonic analysis fully and literally believed that he had identified some distinct phenomena that were incapable of being properly included in standard theories. To me it's just amazing that this single "seductive" work of semi-science is behind both of the lunar perigee stories that emerged within the past two years.

Pop culture has a very short attention span. Casual stargazers really don't care much about where these "fun names" come from. They just want to go outside, look at the Moon, and feel that they have participated in some cosmic event. The "Supermoon" works because the Moon illusion is not widely known to many observer and for them a huge moon is a huge moon ...even when it isn't.

-FER

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