Total Eclipse of the Moon

nasa total eclipse informationHow come there’s no song with this as the title? Sung by someone with a gravelly voice…. (Sorry, semi-obscure ’80’s music reference.)

Anyway, yes, there is one later tonight (more properly, early in the morning on Tuesday). For West Coasters, the interesting phase starts at about 1:50am, and it’ll last for well over three hours, going total at 2:52am and coming out of total at 4:22am. Please make the appropriate adjustment for other timezones.

This is good news for me, as I’ve got eight hour jet-lag from flying back from England yesterday. I was up at 3:00am today, and so I imagine I’ll be feeling fine at 4:00am tomorrow morning, so I’ll go out and have a look at what is supposed to be a nice, deeply red moon. (I won’t be doing any laying on benches in a park, in case you’re wondering.) Here’s the NASA site on the event.

Just to remind you, the earth gets in between the full moon and the sun, and we are seeing our home planet’s shadow go over the moon. This will only happen at full moon since of course the full moon occurs when the moon (orbiting the earth) is as far as it can be on the opposite side of the earth from the sun, which as you know happens every lunar month (~30 days or so). So if the moon’s orbit around the earth was in the exact same plane as the earth’s orbit around the sun, we’d get an eclipse every month. It is not, however, and so it is less frequent, but still pretty frequent. They happen somewhere on the earth every six months or so, but it’s not always convenient for viewing, and so you don’t hear of them so often.

Enjoy!

-cvj

(Happily, I was reminded by two sources, Bad Astronomy (which also points to a more detailed post on Star Stryder) and Caroline on Crack.

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19 Responses to Total Eclipse of the Moon

  1. Pingback: A Trip To The Moon… - Asymptotia

  2. Aw shucks…I missed it. Oh well. Hope you enjoyed it.

    –IP

  3. Harv says:

    My husband and I watched it last night. It was lovely. 🙂

  4. Elliot says:

    Clifford,

    Now you’ve got me thinking. (which isn’t a bad thing) We typically consider the states of matter in terms of degrees of freedom. Is it possible that there are really “fractal” states and the traditional solid/liquid/gas/plasma designations are transition points to be sure but highly dependent on the gravitational/temperature of the environment and intermediate values are permitted.

    I dunno. Just a thought.

    Elliot

  5. Clifford says:

    It’s a suspension (I imagine that is the correct term), and so it has fluid properties.

    -cvj

  6. Elliot says:

    I know its the wrong object but Carly Simon’s “Your So Vain”

    “…and your horse naturally won
    then you flew your Lear Jet up to Nova Scotia
    to see a total eclipse of the sun”

    or something like that.

    I guess somebody could write a song about a total eclipse of the moon.

    Mud is interesting… Is it a liquid or solid?

    Elliot

  7. Amara says:

    Ooooooh, I’ll bet that the psychologists would love to analyze that dream! However, there are many ways to enjoy the mud……. Off-topic, I know.l I can’t think off-hand yet of a song about a total eclipse. I can probably find some poetry though.

  8. Clifford says:

    bright eyes …

    (now got this song stuck in my head since yesterday….)

  9. Bee says:

    turn around… every now and then

  10. Clifford says:

    Actually, I had a rather odd dream involving missing a step while jumping across a divide and ending up falling into and sinking down to my armpits in mud. I pulled myself out and continued. Weird.

    Anyway, moving on… Gobs of forms. Nice collective term there….

    -cvj

  11. Amara says:

    Hi Clifford.. I looked up at the bright Roma hazy (er smoggy) sky and was imagining what you must be seeing. While you were enraptured with lovely universal sights, I was filling out gobs of bureaucratic forms. Guess which I would have rather been doing? I’m glad you had such a nice cosmic night! Your dreams after such an event must be fantastic.

  12. Clifford says:

    Francis – yes, there was… you might recall that we discussed it: http://asymptotia.com/2007/03/02/eclipse/

    Cheers,

    -cvj

  13. Clifford says:

    All excellent songs (there are probably tens of thousands)… but I’m looking for a total eclipse, you see. Dark side not same thing. Neither is a man walking on it, by whatever group (was listening to Walking on the Moon by the Police yesterday, coincidentally… love that…..)

    -cvj

  14. laketrees says:

    haha Bonnie Tyler….Total eclipse of the heart !!!!!! 🙂
    but what about Pink Floyd and Dark Side of the Moon ???
    and REM ….Man on the Moon…..

  15. Aaron Bergman says:

    Guest blogging while Chad is away.

  16. Francis Caestecker says:

    You make me jealous ;).

    But there was one a few months ago, total. It was beautiful. Reddish glow etc.

  17. Clifford says:

    Approaching totality now… it’s lovely.

    -cvj

  18. Clifford says:

    Huh. I’m afraid I did not see that. Great minds…. but aren’t you too young to know about that rather dark period of musical history? (Well, ok…. dark is not a fair word to use…)

    Waitaminit…. wha-hat are you doing posting over there?! I’m confused… Has this been the case for a while?

    -cvj

  19. Aaron Bergman says:

    Stealing my post ideas now? 🙂