Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Blood Moon, Super moon and Blue moon

Today seem to be a great day for astronomy enthusiast. A once in a life time opportunity ( considering ones life time is less than 150 years) has arrived today. Four events are going to take place today. Every where they are saying three, but I am calling it four. As in the video they say three phenomena are occurring today. But I guess, one is just an artifact of calculations, one is merely an observation and one is a real phenomena. And which is the fourth event, not explicitly discussed?
Lets go one by one
1) Total Lunar eclipse: An event where Earth comes in between the Sun and the Moon. The shadow of earth falls on moon, cutting out all the light completely coming from Sun. This is the event not explicitly discussed around. Focus is only on how the Moon will look like today.
2) Blue Moon: Now this is not a phenomena. It is just a case that when two full moons occur in english calender month. So, no phenomena here but just a game of calculations. Since having two full moons in one month is a rare care, thats why the use of words " Once in a blue moon".
3) Supermoon: An event where the Moon appears relatively bigger in size. All because, during its revolution around earth, it has come at a relatively closer distance than the rest of the time. So, an observation that a bigger size moon will be observed.
4) Blood Moon: Now this could be called as a phenomena, I guess. So, when the Lunar eclipse takes,  while all the direct light  from the Sun reaching out to the Moon has been obstructed by the Earth, some amount of light purges through the atmosphere and falls on the Moon. As a result of the distilling of light by the atmosphere, the light that reaches the Moon, results in yielding it a red color, thereby making it look like a shade of blood red color.  I am not sure how really it would be looking. But surely would be great chance to experience it. Do watch this embedded short video to know more about it.



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