Monday, January 21, 2019

Lunar Eclipse (20 January 2019)

A lunar eclipse occurs any time the earth's shadow passes across the moon's surface.  This can only happen during a full moon, when the sun and moon are on opposite sides of the sky.  A full moon occurs approximately every 27 days - so you might think that a lunar eclipse would happen every month. 

That is not the case. 

The moon's orbit around the earth does not line up exactly with the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun.  The moon's orbit is offset by about 5 degrees so a lunar eclipse is a rarer occurrence than a full moon.  The next total lunar eclipse will not happen until May 2021, but it will not be visible in Mid-Michigan.  The next total lunar eclipse that we will be able to see in its entirety will be on the night of 15-16 May 2022.

Last night's eclipse was special for another reason.  The path that the moon takes around the earth is not a perfect circle - it's more of an ellipse.  Sometime the moon is closer to the earth than it is at other times.  The closest approach to the earth is approximately 221,000 miles and the furthest is more than 252,000 miles!  The closest approach to the earth is known as the perigee; the furthest distance from the earth is known as the apogee.  Last night's full moon occurred when the moon was near perigee.  These mean that the moon appeared larger than normal (about 14% larger than it would during apogee).  Although not an astronomical term, a full moon at perigee is commonly called a "supermoon".

Luckily for me, I didn't have to go far to see and photograph last nights eclipse.  I took the following sequence of photographs from my driveway.  In the first image the eclipse has not yet started.  The second two pictures show a partial eclipse as the earth's shadow begins to pass over the moon.  




The final photograph shows the moon at full eclipse.  Even at full eclipse some light does leak around the earth and reflect from the moon's surface.  The earth's atmosphere scatters the shorter wavelengths of visible light (blue and violet) with only the longest wavelengths (orange and red) passing through unchanged - this is the same reason sunsets and sunrises appear red.  Because the red light is the most likely to pass through the atmosphere, the moon appears red during a full lunar eclipse. 




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