This Saturday you’ll have the chance to greet a total lunar eclipse – it’s the third one in less than a year!
I know I’ll be up and gazing at the stars compelled by a state of excitement and thinking what will the future hold for us? Is it going to be anything like what Isaac Asimov has prophesied in his books? Or will we become a horrid empire addicted to spice like in Frank Herbert’s ” Dune”?
If you want to be amongst those who witness the shortest total lunar eclipse this century you’ll have to be awake at 3:16 a.m. PDT. In the morning of the 4th of April we will be all waiting for about one hour and 45 minutes for it to start. At about 4.58 a.m PDT, Earth’s shadow will move across the lunar disk and we will see the mighty, yet short, eclipse.
Lunar eclipses are possible only when the Moon passes directly behind the Earth into its shadow. This can only occur in syzygy – Sun, Earth, and Moon are aligned exactly, with the Earth in the middle. There are 3 types of lunar eclipse – total, partial, and penumbral – and the are 5 stages of a lunar eclipse. Don’t worry, you’ll see it without using binoculars or special equipment – but for the best experience I highly recommend using gear.
I’ve been to a couple of lunar eclipse gatherings in my life time, and every time the moon comes up with that nuance of copper-red, everyone asks why does it have that colour. Well, it’s that way because the world doesn’t stop, it’s in constant motion, and people around the hemisphere are experiencing sunrises, and sunsets which shine incredibly into the Earth’s shadow. The red orb that will appear in our sky on the 4th of April is called a blood moon – it has been a bad omen since the dawn of humankind, when the very first people gazed upon the red’ish sky.
Don’t miss this lunar eclipse, because the next one is set to appear on the 28th of September 2015.
Fun fact – astronomers are calling the 4 eclipses that have plagued our sky, each one 6 months apart from the other, a tetrad. A phenomenon that is incredibly rare.
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