-- Blood moon, Act II, opens soon in the heavens near you. And it will be bigger than Act I.
If you live in the
western half of the United States, you'll have a front-row seat on a
lunar eclipse that will turn the moon a burnt reddish orange for about
an hour Wednesday, creating the second blood moon in relatively short
succession.
The full eclipse will start at 6:25 a.m. ET, NASA says, and last until 7:24 a.m. ET.
Because it happens right
after the perigee, the closest point to Earth in the moon's orbit, this
blood moon will be nearly the size of a super moon -- appearing 5.3%
larger than the previous blood moon on April 15.
Lunar eclipse in a minute
It will be the second in a sequence of four -- called a tetrad
-- that are occurring in roughly six-month intervals. The next one will
appear on April 4, 2015, and the last one on September 28, 2015.
Tetrad a rare treat
With that frequency, one might be misled into thinking that blood moons are commonplace.
There are about two lunar
eclipses per year, NASA says. Some of them -- penumbral eclipses -- are
so subtle, they are vaguely visible and go greatly unnoticed.
Other eclipses just cast
a partial shadow on the moon but lend it none of that blood moon color
that only total eclipses do. And they come around, on average, less than
once a year.
The brilliant hue comes
from the edges of the sun peeking out around the periphery of the Earth
through its atmosphere in a global sunset shining on the moon, which has
to be in just the right position to catch those rays.
Lunar eclipses --
penumbral, partial or total -- occur in random order, NASA says. Getting
four total eclipses in a row is like drawing a rare lunar poker hand of
four of a kind.
"The most unique thing
about the 2014-2015 tetrad is that all of them are visible for all or
parts of the U.S.A.," said NASA eclipse expert Fred Espenak.
Photos: 'Blood moon' sweeps night sky
People in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, for example, will not be able to see Wednesday's blood moon.
In the 21st century,
there will be many such tetrads, but look back a few centuries, and
you'll find the opposite phenomenon, NASA says.
Before the dawn of the 20th century, there was a 300-year period when there were none, Espenak says. Zero.
That would mean that
neither Sir Isaac Newton, Mozart, Queen Anne, George Washington,
Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln nor their contemporaries ever had a chance to
see such a sequence.
The stuff of mystics
There are those who like
to veil these astral junctures in mysticism, and for them, the epilogue
to Wednesday's celestial theatrics could sound like this:
Blood adorned a heavenly plate for Passover fest,
When sun and Earth aligned, a cooper glow to cast,
Upon the face of the moon as it did by Earth pass.
It shall again, to mark another holy rite, alas!
It's common to hang superstitions on blood moons, citing their concurrence with Jewish religious holidays.
The first one in this tetrad fell on Passover; the current one falls on the lesser known holiday of Sukkot, four days after Yom Kippur.
But that's no reason to go loony over cosmic coincidences -- because there are none here.
The Jewish calendar is an ancient lunar one, and holy dates are set, on purpose, to the precise clockwork of the moon's phases.
They're the same predictable ones that make it easy for modern-day astronomers to exactly calculate blood moons.
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