
In Hobart the eclipse begins just 15 minutes after moonrise.įor the rest of Australia, the eclipse will begin before the moon rises. For Brisbane it will start more than an hour after moonrise, so the moon will be higher in the sky. The further north you are, the longer you’ll need to wait before the eclipse begins.

#Time for lunar eclipse tonight full#
So the moon will be much lower in the sky and battling against the twilight glow during the eclipse’s early stages.Įastern Australia will see the eclipse shortly after the full moon rises. The moon will be high in the northern sky.Īcross Australia, the eclipse will happen around moonrise. In New Zealand the eclipse will happen late in the evening, and the eclipse maximum will be just before midnight. But what time that is for you will depend on your timezone. A twilight moon or a midnight moon?Įveryone on the night side of Earth will experience the lunar eclipse simultaneously. It’s also safe to look at – unlike solar eclipses, when special care must be taken when viewing the sun. It will be a wonderful experience to share with family and friends, especially as you won’t need equipment to see it. Just how red it appears will depend on how dusty the Earth’s atmosphere is. It is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds, not 23 hours, 15 minutes, and 4 seconds.The only light reaching the moon’s surface will first pass through the Earth’s atmosphere, which is why the moon will take on a red hue. In the eastern U.S., the moon will have already set by then, but in other, more westerly parts of the world, skygazers will see order restored, the moon unshadowed, and the lions, snakes, and jaguars appeased once more.Ĭorrection: The original version of this story misstated the time it takes for the Earth to make a single rotation. E.T., when the last of the eclipse passes and the full moon reappears. That regularity will return tomorrow at 7:49 a.m. When regularity isn’t there, it just throws us off.” You have harvest moons and all of that stuff. Part of that predictability too is the appearance of the moon. It takes the Earth 365 and a quarter days to go around the sun and 23 hours, 56 minutes and four seconds to spin on its axis.

“We don’t feel the oscillations in cesium atoms, but we notice the sky. “The rhythm of life is driven by astronomical changes,” says Alphonse Sterling, astrophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The eclipse ended when the wives intervened to offer protection.įewer superstitions may surround lunar eclipses in the 21st century, but these celestial moments still inspire both fascination at the sheer loveliness of the spectacle, and at least a little residual unease at the break in the normal, formal pattern of things. The Native American Hupa people believed that the moon possessed 20 wives and many mountain lions and snakes, and when the moon failed to feed the animals sufficiently, they would attack it and make it bleed. The Toba people, who inhabited South America in the 16th century, believed that the eclipse was caused by the spirits of dead people taking the form of jaguars and attacking the moon, leaving it bloody. “The Sun will turn to darkness, and the Moon to blood before the great and dreadful day of the Lord comes,” reads the Bible in Joel 2:31. No matter when an eclipse happened, they were treated with both superstitions and fear.

6, 746 BCE, and was recorded in Babylonian records. The earliest lunar eclipse to which NASA has assigned a date occurred on Feb. Astronomers can both forecast future eclipses and back-date the positions of the Earth, sun, and moon to determine precisely when they have occurred in the past. Humanity’s fascination with lunar eclipses is a long and deep one. The more haze that there is in the atmosphere-caused by anything from dust storms to wildfires to volcanic eruptions-the redder the light that streams through. Red light, however, passes straight through our planet’s air and bathes the moon throughout the duration of the eclipse. Rather, it will glow a ghostly red, known colloquially as a “blood moon.” The phenomenon is a result of the sun’s light streaming through the Earth’s atmosphere, which scatters down-and filters out-blue wavelengths. The moon will not completely vanish from the sky the way the disk of the sun does during a solar eclipse.
