Harvest Moon to Experience Total Lunar Eclipse

The next total lunar eclipse will not be until 2018. Although still about 354,000 kilometres away, this full moon will look bigger and brighter than usual. “Supermoon” will coincide with total lunar eclipse on this day.

This Sunday, many will be looking to the skies in hopes of witnessing something that has only occurred five times since 1900 and will happen for the first time in the 2000s.

During a lunar eclipse, the moon turns a deep red colour due to sunlight being scattered by the Earth’s atmosphere.

These lunar tetrads are fairly rare events with the next one occurring in 2032-2033.

If it’s too cloudy to see the moon, the party will move indoors to the Bell Center for Technology for a live broadcast of the eclipse from another location. “On September 27, we’re going to have a perigee full moon-the closest full moon of the year”.

ON SUNDAY evening, September 27, the Earth will slide precisely between the sun and the moon, throwing the satellite into a rusty red shadow.

The moon as it appears when eclipsed.

Elisha Polomski is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at St. Cloud State University, she says the moon will look dimmed with an orange-brown color during the eclipse.

The total eclipse starts at 8:11 local time and lasts until 9:23 p.m. Partial eclipses will be visible from an hour before to an hour after the total eclipse.

As the NASA video shows, when the moon becomes full at its closest point to Earth (called “perigee”), it’s called a “supermoon“.

The Ames Area Amateur Astronomers is having a Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse Party at the observatory in McFarland Park. The moon will be the reddest and brightest at “Maximum Eclipse” stage, which occurs around 7:47 p.m.