Image: NASA/YouTube
Did you catch the supermoon earlier this week? The astronomical phenomena—wherein the moon is full and closer to the Earth in its orbital path, making it appear much larger than usual—was actually even more special this time: it was the brightest supermoon since 1948.But don't feel bad if you missed it: NASA just posted an awe-inspiring, timelapse video of the supermoon rising behind a Russian Soyuz rocket sitting on its launch pad in the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.The video features suitably spacey, chill post rock music, and it's hard not to feel pretty small watching Earth's natural satellite ascend into the heavens, glowing orange at first like the Sun, and then yellow like the big cheese wheel to which we humans have long compared it. It's also pretty awesome to see the rocket launcher folder into place around the 49.5-meter (about 162-foot-tall) Soyuz rocket, reminding us that humanity has achieved some truly incredible, species-advancing feats through science—including space travel.This rocket is set to blast off to the International Space Station on Thursday, with a three-person crew consisting of astronaut Peggy Whitson of NASA, cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and euronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency. The moon will have to wait.Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.