The Lunar eclipse tonight will give us something to look at -g-
ATLANTA, (Reuters) - The moon will turn bright red on Thursday night during a total lunar eclipse that should be easy to see throughout the Americas, an astronomer said Saturday. The Earth's shadow will totally cover the moon from 11:05 p.m. on Thursday to 12:22 A.M. Friday. "We're kind of expecting that this eclipse will be very bright and probably very bright red," astronomer Brad Schaefer, an expert on this phenomenon at Yale University, told reporters at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta. When the Earth's shadow passed over the moon, the brightest light visible from the lunar surface would be the reddish- orange light from the sun bending around the Earth, Schaefer said. "This same thing happens to us (on Earth) during sunsets," he said. "When the sun has just set, you look off towards the direction of sunset and the same physics is going on ... and so what you're seeing on the moon is basically sunset colors. "In fact, what you're seeing is the sunset colors completely around the globe. You're seeing all of the world's sunsets and all of the world's sunrises simultaneously," Schaefer said. "If the brightest thing in the sky illuminating the moonscape is a bright red light, well, the moon will appear red." |
