That means that the "Blood Moon" effect is often very subtle and barely noticeable. This is because the moon is, of course, not actually "turning red." Nothing is actually happening to the moon, it's just the effect of our atmosphere.Īlso, how "red" the moon will appear depends strongly on how many clouds and how much dust is in the Earth's atmosphere. This means there is more opportunity for red photons to be scattered.Īstronomers don't really like the term " Blood Moon" to describe lunar eclipses. In the case of a lunar eclipse, because the Earth is in between the sun and the moon, photons from the sun have to traverse Earth's atmosphere to hit the moon and be reflected. That's why the sky appears red at sunset sometimes. Because its light then has much more atmosphere to travel through, the red photons begin to be scattered. The situation is different when the sun is on the horizon. This means before a blue photon hits your eye, it has traveled the sky.
The blue photons, however, because of their short wavelength, hit atoms in the upper atmosphere and are bounced off them, or scattered. This means that when the sun is directly overhead red and blue photons, and the individual particles that comprise light stream through our atmosphere, the red photons are able to reach the ground pretty much unhindered. Red light has a long wavelength and a low frequency, and blue light has a short wavelength and a high frequency. These colors take a specific order, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, because of the size of their wavelength and their frequency. The process is actually related to the reason the sky is blue, known as Rayleigh scattering.Īs Isaac Newton discovered, light from the sun is made up of all different colors of light. While a Blood Moon may have had supernatural significance to our ancestors, thanks to science we now know the physical process that causes the moon to take a reddish hue during an eclipse.
#LUNAR ECLIPSE TONIGHT SEATTLE FULL#
This means though it only takes 29.5 days to orbit Earth and complete a full cycle from full moon to full moon, because the moon's orbit is angled at five degrees, it often slips above or below Earth's shadow. Lunar eclipses only happen when the moon is full. This is actually below the average of lunar eclipses for a year, which is three. November's eclipse won't be total, but as 99.1 percent of the moon will be in Earth's shadow, it is considered "almost total." NASAīecause Blood Moons are usually associated with total lunar eclipses, we can easily predict how many Blood Moons Earth will experience each year For instance, in 2022 the Earth will see two total lunar eclipses, one on May 15, the other on November 7.
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