Total Lunar Eclipse
15 Jun 2011 23:40:06 UTC
Topic 195829
(moderation:
Got up at 4am and caught the onset of the limb. Utterly clear sky but well below zero outdoors. However I managed to stay indoors and watch it from a western window, low in the sky near Scorpio - through the penumbra and most of the umbra before it sank below a nearby hill.
The shadow of the Earth on the moon's surface is really a curve - the arc of a circle - so if the Earth is flat it must be a disc shaped platter. :-)
Absolutely beautiful, the stunning thing is that a full moon - the 'face' - usually looks planar or disc like but there is a different shading going on with the full eclipse and one can really see the moon as a true 3D ball. It's blood red and it just hangs there like an enormous balloon and it seems like mere miles away : in fact my visual mind kept 'clicking' into different scales trying to simultaneously match a size with a distance, eventually it settled for something about ten miles away and definitely wouldn't accept the true quarter million. No wonder it brought on medieval fear & panic.
After a while I got bored just watching it, so I ran with the werewolves for a time ( narrowly missing some witches fighting off a plague of bats ) before I crawled into bed covered in lamb entrails ...
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Total Lunar Eclipse
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It was not visible in North America this time around. Withthe crappy weather we have been having, it would not matter anyway.
The colour was suppose to be darker and redder due to recent volcanic activity with more ash in the stratosphere. They say looking at a lunar eclipse you see every sunset happening on the earth simultaneously.
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
RE: RE: Got up at 4am It
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Of course the ash! Yes. That's been running around the roaring forties - we're at 38.5 degrees - to DownUnda from Chile keeping our aeroplanes on the ground. So yes indeed that is why it was a deep red like blood. That's quite an ominous color for the moon.
Cheers, Mike.
( edit ) I looked it up. It's normally blood red because the light hitting the moon's surface ( reflecting back into the watcher's eyes ) has skimmed the atmosphere all around the entire terminator on Earth ie. 'every sunset' ( plus every sunrise too .... ). But at my location with clear skies bar the volcano ash overhead ( in my personal line of sight to the moon ) then it would deepen the red shading a tad more.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal