There’s a total lunar eclipse this evening. The full details, including times and areas from which it can be observed, are available here: Total lunar eclipse 15 April 2014. The best viewing is from the US, Canada and western South America.
If the cloud and rain clear away in Sydney we’ll be able to see the full moon rising out of the Tasman just as it reaches total eclipse.
Hoping the weather cooperates. It’s snowing right now, but the hourly forecast still says it should be breaking up around 1am and at least partly cloudy by 3am when the viewing should be best. Radar right now looks like that might happen, the storm looks like it’s getting weaker. Keeping fingers crossed, that’s a time I’m normally still up, so I will be checking and possibly taking pictures if I see anything.
Here’s a really neat and detailed animation of the eclipse. In the right pane it’ll show against the stars the motion of the Moon AND the motion of the earth’s shadow. HeyWhatsThat: Eclipses
It uses side-by-side Google Earth plugin panels and may take a while to load. On the left, locate your city on the globe and click it. Then click on “fly me to the moon” at the lower right.
And the date of Lincoln’s assassination (which also happened to be Good Friday that year).
Too bad here in Chicago it may be cloudy. We just had about an inch of SNOW!
Ha, my son was taking notes during the eclipse (I have no idea, things like “amplitude”), and so he could see what he was writing he was wearing these glasses that have little lights on the temples.
It was about all I could do not to say “Turn around, bright eyes.”
Looked good from Melbourne. The sky was a little too bright, and the haze too thick, to see it very clearly until it got further up the sky, which by then had lost most of its redness.
Clouds cleared enough to see it once the eclipse was full. Moon turned the reddest just before the shadow started to move off and a sliver of white started showing. Truly blood red. Kinda neato. I couldn’t get good pics from my bedroom window, but wasn’t about to go back outside with snow on the ground after I was already in my jammies.
I watched it from the very beginning to the point of becoming total, then I got tired and chilly and went inside.
Here (northern San Joaquin Valley area) it was just slightly hazy. The moon was visible passably clearly, and Mars, but not a single other star was visible. Once it became total, it was just barely visible but not really any visible “blood moon” color. I think probably the slight haze was just enough to obscure that.
During the time that I watched (about an hour and a half or so), about 15 airplanes flew past, ALL of them following exactly the same path that happened to pass between the moon and Mars, all in the same direction. I guess that must have been some standard commercial aviation flyway. I imagine they were all heading toward San Francisco or Oakland.