Eclipsing all.....!
What a stroke of fate. For the last several days the usually clear skies of West Texas have been obscured by clouds. Knowing that there would be a full lunar eclipse tonight, I didn't have much hope that we would see any of it.
But at about 9:45 the clouds gave way to a fully clear sky revealing the moon already passing through the earth's shadow. A grand sight...and one that I'm sure gave many ancient, native people quite a worry.
A total eclipse one might ask, well how come I can still see the moon in a faint red hue? The answer is thus. During an eclipse, when the Moon is in the Earth's shadow, there is a little bit of sunlight that passes through our atmosphere and is deflected by the Earth's gravity. White light from the sun is composed of all the colors of the rainbow, but our atmosphere treats different colors differently. Blue-colored light is scattered in all directions by airborne molecules. This is the same phenomenon that causes the sky to be blue. Red-colored light, on the other hand, is scattered very little. However, it is refracted inward toward the Moon. Red light that hits the Moon is reflected back toward Earth, so that we see the Moon glowing red during totality. If the Earth did not have an atmosphere, the Moon would be nearly black during a total lunar eclipse.
So now you know the rest of the story and I hope it was a cloudless night at your home.
What a stroke of fate. For the last several days the usually clear skies of West Texas have been obscured by clouds. Knowing that there would be a full lunar eclipse tonight, I didn't have much hope that we would see any of it.
But at about 9:45 the clouds gave way to a fully clear sky revealing the moon already passing through the earth's shadow. A grand sight...and one that I'm sure gave many ancient, native people quite a worry.
A total eclipse one might ask, well how come I can still see the moon in a faint red hue? The answer is thus. During an eclipse, when the Moon is in the Earth's shadow, there is a little bit of sunlight that passes through our atmosphere and is deflected by the Earth's gravity. White light from the sun is composed of all the colors of the rainbow, but our atmosphere treats different colors differently. Blue-colored light is scattered in all directions by airborne molecules. This is the same phenomenon that causes the sky to be blue. Red-colored light, on the other hand, is scattered very little. However, it is refracted inward toward the Moon. Red light that hits the Moon is reflected back toward Earth, so that we see the Moon glowing red during totality. If the Earth did not have an atmosphere, the Moon would be nearly black during a total lunar eclipse.
So now you know the rest of the story and I hope it was a cloudless night at your home.
