The total eclipse of the moon tonight will be the last one we’ll see in North America until December 2010. Your kids will be almost another 2 years older! I will be within a few months of having a teenager in the house(........pause for brief prayer..........).
The actual total eclipse will be from 9:01-9:51pm (Central), but apparently the moon is partially eclipsed beginning from 8pm. This site will explain it all to you. As an added bonus, you will be able to see Saturn just below the moon.
In the Americas, the Atlantic, Europe and Africa, people have a ringside seat to tonight’s total eclipse. But in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the eclipse occurs during daylight hours, when the eclipsed moon will be beneath the horizon as seen from that part of the world.
Our chart shows tonight’s eclipsed moon, with two bright objects nearby. One is a planet, Saturn, now nearly at its closest and brightest for all of 2008. The other is the star Regulus in the constellation Leo the Lion.
Strangely, the moon’s appearance during an eclipse depends partially on Earth’s weather as a whole. Usually the fully eclipsed moon appears in some gradation from dark gray to a bright red or orange. Any light that falls on the moon during a total eclipse does not come directly from the sun. Instead it passes around the Earth, like light coming over the horizon just after sunset. In fact, the light that illuminates the moon during eclipse is the same as the sunset glow, but from the full 360 degrees of the round Earth! So if weather conditions on Earth are – on the whole – suitable for bright red sunsets, the eclipse will be colored like that. If instead Earth’s sunsets are mostly dark, the eclipse will be dark.
Of course, the mid south is predicted to have cloud cover with rain....not good lunar eclipse viewing weather. If you are somewhere without clouds, this website (where the photo above came from) had really good directions on how to photograph a lunar eclipse.
Aussie Kim
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