Tracing back to its April 4 and April 17 eclipses, this Friday’s partial lunar eclipse peaked at 1:44 p.m. EDT, reported Science Insider. As the moon slowly turned red, so too did the viewers in North America, Australia, Africa, and Europe. The total eclipse hit at 8:13 p.m. EDT.
It might be extra rare for this unique event to reach us so soon after this year’s Super Moon, when the moon appeared 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter, reported Science Insider.
When the moon begins to turn red in an eclipse, it is almost like the moon is turning red through physical heat, wrote the National Science Foundation. “That happens when sunlight is bent by the Earth’s atmosphere. But only when the atmosphere of the first-o [earth’s first pole] is cooler than the atmosphere of the last-o, a phenomenon called an annulus,” wrote Science Insider.
Unfortunately for those interested in further details, there’s not a lot to know about why this happens, wrote YouTube host Tom Green.
It turns out that these partial lunar eclipses happen every 26 months or so, which means this isn’t the first of these. They could actually happen all of the time if astronomers had not controlled this phenomenon in the 1800s with mirrors and glass.
Read the full story at Science Insider.
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