Moon To Put On A Show Tonight

Those of us who are retired or don't have to go to work on Tuesday morning (and those willing to drag through work on Tuesday because they got no sleep the night before) are going to be treated to a wonderful show in the heavens -- a total lunar eclipse.   The eclipse can be viewed from start to finish in North America, Greenland and Iceland.   Western Europe can see the first part and Western Asia can see the last part of the eclipse.

The eclipse will officially start at 11:29pm on Monday night CST (12:29am EST, 10:29pm MST, 9:29pm PST) -- I will be using Central Standard Time (CST) for the remainder of this post for no better reason than I live in the Central Time Zone (Texas).   Although the moon begins to enter the Earth's penumbra (the outer part of the Earth's shadow cone) at this time, most viewers will not notice a difference until about 45 minutes later.

At about 12:13am the moon will be far enough into the penumbra so that a subtle shading will appear on the upper left portion of the moon, which will become more evident as the minutes pass.

At about 12:33am the moon will start to enter the umbra (the darker central part of the Earth's shadow core).   A darker shadow will appear at the moon's upper left edge and begin to crawl across the face of the moon.

At about 1:41am the total eclipse begins as all of the moon moves into the umbra.   At this time the moon may appear brown, orange or red (the darkness and color will depend on how much debris is in the air, like volcanic ash).   The only reason the moon can be seen at all during this phase of the eclipse is because of light refracted around the Earth's edge by its atmosphere.   The picture above is of an eclipse with very little debris in the atmosphere, giving the moon an orange appearance.

At 2:53am the total eclipse will start to end as the moon starts to leave the umbra.   It will be completely out of the umbra by 4:01am.   The moon will leave the penumbra at 5:04am and the eclipse will officially be over.  

I know this is not a rare occurrence.   The last eclipse was on June 26th.   However, I love this kind of stuff and I'll be bundled up warmly and outside watching the show.   After all, it's free and available for viewing by everyone.