Tonight’s Lunar Eclipse

They call it a blood moon, because it looks like this:

But that came later.

Right now still in the evening of March 13th in the Eastern time zone, the Moon is as full as it can get without moving into the shadow of Earth . Which it will. Shortly. Here is where Earth’s shadow is right now, as I write this, at around 10 PM Eastern Time:

The outer circle is Earth’s partial shadow. The inner circle is its complete shadow.

Here is how the Moon will look when it moves between one and the other:

And here is a close-up of how it will look when it is completely in the shadow, at about 3 AM, Eastern Time:

And this is how Earth and the Sun will look from the Moon at that time:

And if you zoom in on Earth, what you will see is a red ring, which is one round sunset circling the whole planet, and night across everything between:

I grabbed all these images from a program called Starry Night Pro Plus 7. I’ve had versions of Starry Night since my 28-year-old son was a toddler. For years we would sit out on our deck every night using Starry Night as a small rectangular planetarium. So hats off to the makers for keeping it going so long.

If you want to know more, Space.com has this.

Update at 3:17am, March 14…

A few minutes ago, at 3 AM, when the Moon has traveled into Earth’s shadow, here is what I saw:

Or, more correctly, what my Sony A7iv saw through its FE 70-200 mm F2.8 GM OSS II lens. Cropped, it looks like what I just put at the top of the post.

Now back to bed. Cheers, all.