Monday, December 20, 2010

Lunar Eclipse Early Tomorrow Morning

December 21st, the longest night of the year is rolling in faster than ever. The Christmas Tree is up, with all it's pointy little lights and seasonal fragrance putting us all finally into that once-a-year-Christmas spirit! Jessye Norman's "The Holly and the Ivy" is serenading the living room, the dogs are stretched out on the carpet by the gleaming coals of a fire in need of another log, but it's cold outside, and we are knitting, and sorting Christmas cards and ornaments in some cases and blogging and others, and mutually too cozy to get up to get one.

The sky is is blanketed in the deepest navy blue cloak which I would like to say is the Gown that Our Lady wears to Evening Vespers. But her pureness of heart radiates so perfectly that pinpoints of light poke through the velvet and shine all the way down from heaven!

Last night I woke up to find myself starring at a rusty orange orb, not bright enough to be the sun, but too strange to be the moon. An orange moon? But it was the moon. I slipped out from under my warm blankets into the annoyingly chilly air of my room to look more closely from the window. There it was, very low in the western sky, shinning a persistent, abnormal orange.

Unfortunately, it was 6:15 in the morning, and I was still bleary eyed, and foggy minded, and I could not remember where I had placed the battery of my camera, so I do not have any photographs to document the strange spectacle.
As I stared at the moon, with black twigs breaking it up like it was a gold disc with its paint cracking all over the place, it began to disappear below the horizon. I literally watched the moon set! In a matter of 90 seconds, the odd sight had left its small occupation of the night sky to be filled by a rising of a gradient of water-colors from an all blue paint set.

What makes the moon orange? I wondered, as I crawled back into bed. In bed, I did a little research. The answer is really quite simple and logical. Look at the diagram below, (which I obtained from
http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/moonorange/).

When the moon is directly above the surface of Earth, you and I only have to look through a little bit of Earth's atmosphere, as the red line shows. But when the Moon is at an angle, you can see from the blue line that there is more than three times the amount of atmosphere (gasses and natural and artificial pollution) for light to pass through. This "shadow" of Earth's atmosphere that the sun shines through before it gets to the moon determines the color that the moon appears to be.



Coincidentally, tonight there will be a full Lunar Eclipse which NASA has reported to be the first since 1638 to occur on the Winter Solstice (the longest day of the year). The next time this will happen will be in 2093. (I will be 102 then.)
For all of you moon-oglers, here is the program for tonight's theatrical production starring Earth and Moon (and perhaps cloud if he is grouchy enough to intrude):

  • 1:32 AM Moon enters Umbra (the shadow of Earth)
  • 2:41 Totality (Moon is Completely Covered by Earth's Shadow and May look orange for exactly the same reasons I just explained)
  • 3:17 Mid Eclipse (The Moon is at its darkest and hard to find in the Western sky)
  • 3:55 Totality Ends
  • 5:00 Moon Leaves Umbra
I hope all of you will be able to watch this remarkable sight, and have many pictures and stories to share. If you haven't been able to tell, I am crazily excited for this rare natural show and second only to the Northern Lights, this is something I have always wanted to see! (Big green check on my things to see before I die list).

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