An unusual set of celestial circumstances came together over on Sunday night and the wee hours yesterday for skywatchers in Europe, Africa and the Americas, where the moon was fully obscured before lighting up again with a faint red glow.
In the streets of Mexico City, Los Angeles and Paris and in the Moroccan desert, moongazers turned to the sky to observe the phenomenon at about midnight in the Americas and shortly before dawn in Europe and Africa.
The eclipse lasted about three hours: During the first hour the full moon was gradually swallowed up by the shadow of the Earth, then an hour of total eclipse where it was not invisible, but instead appeared tinted in hues of red, orange and pink, followed finally by its full re-emergence, bright and shining.
Photo: Reuters
The full moon appeared bigger than normal because it was closer to the Earth — about 358,000km away — earning it the nickname “supermoon.”
Other monikers include a “wolf moon,” a traditional way of coining an eclipse in the month of January, and a “blood moon” because of its rusty, red color. Hence, the name for this year’s event: a “super blood wolf moon.”
At its peak, where night skies were clear of clouds, Venus and Jupiter shone brightly in the night sky. Not everyone was fortunate: In London, for example, astronomy enthusiasts’ hopes were dashed by a cloudy night.
During a lunar eclipse, the moon appears red because the light of the sun no longer directly illuminates it, since Earth is passing in between the moon and sun.
“The color is due to Rayleigh scattering — where the sun’s blue light is scattered off molecules in Earth’s atmosphere — which also happens at sunsets,” the Royal Astronomical Society of Britain said. “The sun’s red light is scattered much less by air, and is bent by Earth’s atmosphere in a process called refraction, traveling all the way through it to light up the moon’s surface.”
Total or partial lunar eclipses happen at least twice a year on average, said Florent Deleflie, an astronomer at the Observatory of Paris-PSL, adding that they are just not visible everywhere.
It is a rare event when a total lunar eclipse is visible on so many parts of the Earth’s land mass, as was the case yesterday.
Europeans last saw a total lunar eclipse in July last year. The next chance for a glimpse at a lunar eclipse will be in 2022, but the entire continent will not be able to see the totality of a lunar eclipse again until 2029.
North Americans may get their next glimpse of a blood moon in 2021 along the west coast and 2022 on the east coast.
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