Finally, Another Lunar Eclipse!

.....After several years, there will again be a Total Lunar Eclipse (yes, I capitalized everything) early Tuesday morning . The east coast is not well set, but the Upper Midwest, the Southwest, and the West Coast have some potential. Give it a shot!  What have you really got to lose?

.....(Sleep.  The answer is sleep, but in the grabd scheme of things, this is our best lunar eclipse for a few years.)

.....To see this, all you need is a good view of the skies (from the Americas). If you have a telescope, or even binoculars, that will make things even better, but it isn't necessary.

.....The first stage is when the Moon enters the Earth's penumbra, the shadow where part of the Sun, but not all of it, is blocked. This will be pretty much undetectable. The Moon enters the penumbra at: 11:18 PM (CDT/ UT -6, which is 12:18 AM Tuesday in the Eastern Time Zone, and 10:18 PM in Mountain Daylight Time, and so on.)  The Moon will entirely be within the umbra by about 12:19 AM CDT, but again, this will still be hard to detect.

.....The Moon starts to enter the umbra, the central shadow at 12:21 AM (again, CDT, the best time zone) , and totality, with the Moon entirely in the umbra from 1:28 AM to 2:52 AM. 

.....On Earth, a total eclipse of the Sun is completely dark, but in a lunar eclipse, the light being blocked by the Earth behaves differently than light being blocked by the Moon.  The Moon has no atmosphere, so the shadow of the Moon is sharp, but the light must pass through the Earth's atmosphere.  Look at the sky -- the reason that the sky is blue is because the shorter the wavelength of light (the bluer the light is), the more than the light gets scattered.  The blue light is scattered first, and the setting Sun appears red because red light is scattered last.  This red light is spread into the shadow, and the totally eclipsed Moon will appear a deep red, sometimes getting so faint that theFull Moon is hard to find in the sky.

.....The Moon leaves the umbra at 4:00 AM CDT, so the party is then pretty much over.

.....This lunar eclipse happens after the Spring Solstice (believe it or not, those of us looking at snow tonight), so the Sun is getting higher in the sky.  The Full Moon (exactly on the opposite side of the sky) will be in Virgo, a bit lower in the sky.The Full Moon will be very close to the planet Mars and the bright star Spica.  Spica can be identified by starting at the Big Dipper, as follows:

.........If you follow the curve of the Big Dipper's handle, the curve will arc towards the bright star Arcturus, in Bootes (coming soon), and if you go past Arcturus, you will speed on to Spica, in Virgo.  Mars is the bright red object that will be a bit higher in the sky than Spica.  From the Upper Midwestern United States, the Moon will be about a third of the way up the sky at maximum eclipse, high enough, where it should be easily seen.

.....If you do get a chance to see it, please let me know!

Getting Mooned

SOMEBODY clearly needs to work out how to make the automated posting feature in Blogger work properly.  This should have gone up on Thursday.

....All photos in this post were taken by the author using a Canon PowerShot A630, sometimes through an 8" Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope.  The camera is held up to the telescope by an Orion SteadyPix Deluxe. 

.....If you have been outside in the evenings, you will have noticed that the Moon is getting bigger and brighter each night, heading to a full Moon tomorrow.  I have to confess that I've been (perhaps unfairly) biased against the Moon.  From the time that I started getting interested in astronomy, I have been searching in the sky for new objects that I haven't seen before, trying to find the faintest thing that I could find.  The Moon was therefore my enemy.


.....Furthermore, I could never find the "Man in the Moon".  Do you see it below?  I don't.

.....I do, however, see the rabbit.  The idea of the rabbit in the moon appears in a number of Asian legends, but I think that I'm remembering a story where the rabbit is thrown there.  Watership Down? Anyway, if you don't see it, here it is:

.....Zooming in:

.....See?  The rabbit even has a carrot.  This hatred of the Moon eased when my wife got me an attachment for my telescope allowing the camera to stay still long enough to take images through the telescope.  Here is a image of the waxing crescent Moon.

.....Photography actually is helping me enjoy observing the Moon.  One of my problems has been that it has been hard for me to adjust to most of the available maps of the Moon.  Why this is, I'm not sure.  Telescopes will invert the images as we see them. (In most cases, who cares, as there is no "up" in space - except on the Moon.)  Antonin Rükl's Atlas of the Moon was much easier to use for me (it seems that there is a revised edition - I wonder what changed), so I was able to map images to place names.  This means thta I can learn more about specific places, and then go back later and find them again!  Let's start with some of the Maria (singular: Mare), dark areas on the Moon produced from three to three and a half billion years ago when massive impactors hit the Moon hard enough to break through the surface and cause some of the still-molten interior of the Moon to boil up and re-surface the area.  Maria typically have few craters, since they were formed after most big things that were going to hit other big things already had.  (It is not a thing that could be done twice, after all.)  These features are named as if they were bodies of water because they appeared flat and featureless to early telescopic observers.

.....Let's start by looking at some of the Maria best visible during the first half of the month, and as the blog goes on, I will return to the Moon when I can to look at more features, and learn more about the ones we can identify.  The photo below has labeled areas including Mare Humboldtianum (Humboldt's Sea, named after an explorer because it lies on the border of the part of the Moon that we can see, and the part of the Moon that we can't see, always on the edge of the unknown), Mare Crisium (The Sea of Crisis), Mare Frigoris (The Sea of Cold), Lacus Somniorum (The Lake of Dreams), Mare Tranquitalis (The Sea of Tranquility), Mare Fecunditatis (the Sea of Fertility), and Mare Serenitatis (the Sea of Serenity)

.....For instance, that footprint, Mare Undorum (the Sea of Waves) and Mare Spumans (the Foaming Sea) - what's up with that?