November’s Full Beaver Supermoon Peaks Today—And It Will Be The Year’s Biggest

November’s Full Beaver Supermoon Peaks Today—And It Will Be The Year’s Biggest

Stargazers and Luna-lovers are being spoiled this autumn. Having already enjoyed a late Harvest Moon spectacle in October, they can now follow that up with a second supermoon that will be the largest of 2025.

A supermoon is a colloquial term for when the Moon reaches perigee, the closest point to Earth during it’s orbital rotation. This makes the Moon noticeably larger.

Annoyingly, the Moon will reach peak brightness after Sunrise—at 8:19 am Eastern Time (13:19 GMT), but tonight (and yesterday night if you happened to see it) it will also be very bright and a few hairs short of full.

Incredibly, this is the second of three consecutive supermoons this year.

Supermoons tend not to be so super-sized, unless you’re experiencing the optical illusion of viewing the Moon when it’s close to the horizon. Instead, the word ‘super’ more accurately describes its brightness. Compared to a full moon of average size, a supermoon is 16% brighter, but compared to a “micromoon,” when the Moon is full and at apogee—the farthest point of orbit from the Earth—a supermoon is 30% brighter.

According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the term Beaver Moon comes from fur trappers who used it to mark the time that beavers begin to take shelter in their lodges, having laid up sufficient food stores for the long winter ahead.

The Dakota and Lakota call it the Deer Rutting Moon, while the Tlingit refer to it as the Digging Moon, as animals begin digging for food beneath frosted ground.