MessageToEagle.com – Coming soon for the first time in more than 30 years: skygazers will be able to witness a supermoon in combination with a lunar eclipse.
The celestial show, visible from the Americas, Europe, Africa, west Asia and the east Pacific, will be the result of the Sun, Earth and a larger-than-life, extra-bright Moon lining up for just over an hour from 0211 GMT.
“It will be quite exciting and especially dramatic,” predicted astronomer Sam Lindsay of the Royal Astronomical Society in London.
“It’ll be brighter than usual, bigger than usual.”
The Moon will be at its closest orbital point to Earth, called perigee, while also in its brightest phase, ‘ reports Yahoo News.
The resulting “supermoon” will look 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than when at apogee, the farthest point — which is about 49,800 kilometres (31,000 miles) from perigee.
Unusually, our planet will take position in a straight line between the Moon and the Sun, blotting out the direct sunlight that normally makes our satellite glow whitish-yellow.
But some light will still creep around Earth’s edges and be filtered through its atmosphere, casting an eerie red light that creates the “blood moon”.
The Moon travels to a similar position every month, but the tilt of its orbit means it normally passes above or below the Earth’s shadow — so most months have a full moon minus eclipse. For people younger than 33, this will be their first-ever chance to see a “super blood moon”.
From Astronomie Populaire 1879. wikipedia
In ancient times,peoples believed that the eclipse was a bad omen, a sign of gloom and doom.
However, those who had knowledge of the eclipse schedule and could predict it – were very powerful.
Christopher Columbus used this information to his advantage when his ship ran aground off Jamaica. The local Taino people fed him and his crew for months while the Spaniards tried to repair the ship, but after a while the locals grew tired of the endless provisioning.
Knowing that a lunar eclipse would occur on February 29, 1504 from reading his charts, Columbus threatened to take away the moon if the locals didn’t keep feeding his crew.
When the eclipse occurred, the natives were astounded and, of course, fed the great man who could control the light of the moon, according to some legends.
The last, only the fifth recorded since 1900, was in 1982, according to the NASA space agency, and the next will not be until 2033. If the weather holds, that is — the spectacle would not be visible behind cloud cover.
The event is also of great interest for researchers. Over a 24-day cycle, the temperature on the surface of our satellite normally ambles between highs of about 121 degrees Celsius (250 degrees Fahrenheit) in direct sunlight, and lows around minus 115 C in the shade.
These changes help researchers study the composition of the crust, as rocks warm and cool slower than sand-like dust.
But on Monday, the eclipse will see that temperature shift happen much faster, over the duration of the eclipse — confining the observable change to the very outer surface, said Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for NASA’s lunar orbiter.
“That almost instant change tells us about the upper few centimetres of the surface. We’re getting a very fine, unique measurement of the uppermost surface,” Petro told AFP.
Monday’s “blood moon” will be the last in a string of four total lunar eclipses since April 15, 2014, in a series astronomers call a tetrad.
See also:
Why Lunar Eclipses Were Considered Bad Omen In Ancient Times
Unlike a solar eclipse, which creates the impression of a bright “ring” of light as the Moon passes before our star, there is no danger in watching Monday’s lunar spectacle with the naked eye, the experts say.
MessageToEagle.com
source: Yahoo News