Tonight we can sit back and catch a beautiful glimpse of the lunar eclipse starting at 1:33 a.m. Est.... For all of y'all that doesn't know what a lunar elcipse is here is the scientific explanation: During a lunar eclipse, the Earth lines up directly between the sun and the moon, so there is no direct sunlight to hit and reflect off the moon’s surface. The only light that reaches it is “filtered and bending through our atmosphere,” MacRobert says. That gives it the color of “all of the world’s sunrises and sunsets” together.
The total eclipse will last for 72 minutes, a deeper “night within a night,” as he puts it. The moon will be partially eclipsed for about an hour as it goes into and out of the Earth’s shadow. The total eclipse will last from 2:41 to 3:53 a.m. ET.
“It’s going to take a long time to watch the whole eclipse, about 3½ hours,” says Rebecca Johnson, editor of StarDate magazine.
The color the moon takes on during the eclipse depends on what’s in Earth’s upper atmosphere, or stratosphere, says Fred Espenak, a scientist emeritus with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and eclipse specialist.
“Volcanoes throw up sulfur dioxide, and when that gets to the upper atmosphere in the stratosphere, it combines with water vapor, creating a smog of sulfuric acid that reddens the light even more. So the more volcanic activity you have on Earth, the more it darkens and reddens the eclipse.”
Richard Keen, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, says the stratosphere is fairly clear right now, so this eclipse will be pretty light, most likely bright red to bright orange. “So it will be very colorful,” Espenak says.
