On Saturday night -- weather permitting -- people will be able to watch the moon rise, brick-red and encased in shadow.
March 3, 2007 (Press Release) --
On Saturday night -- weather permitting -- people will be able to watch the moon rise, brick-red and encased in shadow.
There will be a total lunar eclipse that night. Because of the timing, the moon will rise in full eclipse at about 5:30 p.m., then slowly emerge from eclipse by 7 p.m.
"It will rise right in the middle of the eclipse,'' Geoff Chester, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C., said Monday.
This is the first lunar eclipse for North America in nearly two and a half years. The last one occurred in October 2004, when the Boston Red Sox were on their way to winning the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals -- a conjunction of weird, unearthly events that's unlikely to ever materialize again in our lifetime.
There will be a second eclipse this year, on Aug. 28. Chester said it will be a mirror-image of this one, with the moon setting in full eclipse at dawn.
A lunar eclipse happens when the Earth's orbit takes it between the sun and the moon. The Earth blocks the sun's light from reaching the moon, throwing it into shadow.
A solar eclipse happens when the moon comes between the Earth and the sun.
Because the moon is small -- relative to Earth and sun -- the path of solar eclipse is a narrow one. But when there's a lunar eclipse, a entire hemisphere gets to watch.
Because people have been studying the moon for so long, there's a huge body of knowledge about it. But Chester of the Naval Observatory said professional astronomers still use a lunar eclipse to learn new things.
They use infrared cameras to chart changes in the temperature of the surface of the moon -- something they can't do when the sun is shining directly on the moon's surface and there's too much light.
Where there's a normal amount of fine dust high above the Earth, the moon will appear coppery-red in eclipse. But when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, there was a huge amount of volcanic ash in the sky and "you could not see the moon,''
After the two lunar eclipses this year, there will another visible in North America on Feb. 21, 2008. Then there will be a lag until December 2010. The big show will be in 2017, when a solar eclipse cuts a path across the United States from Oregon to South Carolina.
The weather -- which will be turn from a messy mix of snow and sleet to heavy rain today -- should clear enough Saturday to at least let people glimpse the moon through clumps of clouds, said meteorologist Bill Jacquemin of the Connecticut Weather Center in Danbury.
"If you look to the east as the moon rises, you should be able to see it," Jacquemin said. "It won't be perfectly clear. There will still be a scattering of clouds. But it won't be wet."
Author: Robert Miller
Source: http://www.newstimeslive.com/
There will be a total lunar eclipse that night. Because of the timing, the moon will rise in full eclipse at about 5:30 p.m., then slowly emerge from eclipse by 7 p.m.
"It will rise right in the middle of the eclipse,'' Geoff Chester, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C., said Monday.
This is the first lunar eclipse for North America in nearly two and a half years. The last one occurred in October 2004, when the Boston Red Sox were on their way to winning the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals -- a conjunction of weird, unearthly events that's unlikely to ever materialize again in our lifetime.
There will be a second eclipse this year, on Aug. 28. Chester said it will be a mirror-image of this one, with the moon setting in full eclipse at dawn.
A lunar eclipse happens when the Earth's orbit takes it between the sun and the moon. The Earth blocks the sun's light from reaching the moon, throwing it into shadow.
A solar eclipse happens when the moon comes between the Earth and the sun.
Because the moon is small -- relative to Earth and sun -- the path of solar eclipse is a narrow one. But when there's a lunar eclipse, a entire hemisphere gets to watch.
Because people have been studying the moon for so long, there's a huge body of knowledge about it. But Chester of the Naval Observatory said professional astronomers still use a lunar eclipse to learn new things.
They use infrared cameras to chart changes in the temperature of the surface of the moon -- something they can't do when the sun is shining directly on the moon's surface and there's too much light.
Where there's a normal amount of fine dust high above the Earth, the moon will appear coppery-red in eclipse. But when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, there was a huge amount of volcanic ash in the sky and "you could not see the moon,''
After the two lunar eclipses this year, there will another visible in North America on Feb. 21, 2008. Then there will be a lag until December 2010. The big show will be in 2017, when a solar eclipse cuts a path across the United States from Oregon to South Carolina.
The weather -- which will be turn from a messy mix of snow and sleet to heavy rain today -- should clear enough Saturday to at least let people glimpse the moon through clumps of clouds, said meteorologist Bill Jacquemin of the Connecticut Weather Center in Danbury.
"If you look to the east as the moon rises, you should be able to see it," Jacquemin said. "It won't be perfectly clear. There will still be a scattering of clouds. But it won't be wet."
Author: Robert Miller
Source: http://www.newstimeslive.com/
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