|
A Super Harvest Blood Moon will light up the sky Tuesday night, just in time for the spooky season.
The full harvest moon occurs every year in September, but this event happens when the moon is at perigee, or closest point to Earth.
That means this Harvest Moon will be a supermoon and will appear 14 percent larger than a normal full moon.
And in an even spookier twist, it will also be a blood moon. They only occur during lunar eclipses and bathe the moon in red light.
Like supermoons, blood moons occur several times a year, but these events rarely happen at the same time.
On Tuesday, a Super Harvest Blood Moon will light up the night sky. It will appear larger than usual and glow red — a terrifying sight to kick off the spooky season.
This is the second of four consecutive supermoons that will sweep across the sky until November.
It will be visible on the evening of Tuesday, September 17 and the morning of Wednesday, September 18.
For stargazers in the United States, the super blood moon will appear in the eastern sky at approximately 7:50 a.m. on the East Coast and 7:10 a.m. on the West Coast.
A lunar eclipse will occur on Tuesday night, giving the moon a red glow.
On the East Coast, it starts around 8:41 a.m., peaks at 10:44 a.m., and ends at 12:47 p.m.
On the West Coast, it will begin at 7:12 a.m., peak at 10:44 a.m., and end at 12:47 p.m.
During an eclipse, you won’t see the entire moon disappear behind the Earth’s shadow. Instead, you’ll see a small portion of it disappear briefly before reappearing.
This is because only that strip will be obscured by the Earth’s ‘umbra,’ or the dark part of our planet’s shadow.
“Except for a small dark spot at the top of the lunar disk, most of the visible lunar disk will be in Earth’s penumbra, the lightest part of the planet’s shadow that doesn’t completely block sunlight,” said Teresa Monsu, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. NPR.
During a lunar eclipse, sunlight filters through the Earth’s atmosphere, making the lunar surface appear red.
But even this slight overlap between the shadows of the Moon and Earth is enough to change the way we perceive the color of the lunar surface.
During a lunar eclipse, the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon. This partially blocks sunlight from reaching the lunar surface, but some light escapes.
These photons must pass through Earth’s atmosphere to illuminate the Moon. The atmosphere acts as a filter, scattering blue light but allowing longer wavelengths of red, yellow and orange light to pass through.
This is what gives the moon its reddish-brown appearance that we refer to as a “blood moon.”
Individually, a harvest moon, a supermoon, and a blood moon are not particularly rare or unusual events. Each of them happens every year. But three occurrences in a single full moon are rare.
The next time it will happen will not be until September 2033, and then it will not happen again until 2042.
