'Blood moon' will be a sight to behold during total lunar eclipse
CNN) -- Prophecy loves signs from the heavens, and they will deliver Tuesday with a moonlight spectacle.
What will happen could sound sort of like this:
The moon will turn to blood as it aligns with Earth and sun
Then do so thrice more ere a year and a half is done,
'Tis not the herald of the apocalypses
Just the first of four total lunar eclipses.
In other words, get ready for an unusually beautiful moon to grace the night skies next week. There will be a total lunar eclipse Tuesday that will turn the moon a burnt reddish orange, NASA says.
It's called a blood moon, and this one is just the first in a series of four consecutive total eclipses.
Within a year and a half, North America will be able to see a blood moon a total of four times. The moon takes on this color during the eclipse as it passes through the Earth's shadow, which is the color of a desert sunset.
The four blood moons will occur in roughly six-month intervals on the following dates: April 15, 2014; October 8, 2014; April 4, 2015, and September 28, 2015.
With that frequency, one might be misled into thinking that they 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.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/11/tech/innovation/blood-moon/index.html?hpt=hp_t3
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Surely you jest!
More on that here: Seeing red: Heavens to unveil a total lunar eclipse early Tuesday morning
By Blaine Friedlander April 14 at 12:45 pm
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To catch the moon with the red tint, check out the totality phase between 3:07 a.m. and 4:25 a.m., says noted eclipse expert Fred Espenak, retired from NASA, who runs the MrEclipse.com website. Look to the southern sky in the wee hours, as total lunar eclipses are safe – and fun – to watch. The Earth sits between the sun and moon, shading sunlight from the usually brilliant full moon.
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Four-of-a-kind
This total lunar eclipse is the first of four-in-a-row and that astronomical treat is called a tetrad. The next total lunar eclipses will be Oct. 8, 2014, and April 4 and Sept. 28, 2015. For Washington, Espenak says that Tuesday’s eclipse and the September 2015 event will be the area’s better events.
Tetrads are part of a 565-year cycle. Between 1582 and 1908, there were no tetrads. In this century, there are eight. “For centuries, we don’t see any tetrads, but now we’re in a period now with a lot of tetrads,” Espanak says. The last quartet was 2003-04, while the next quartet will be 2032-33.
All in the family
Eclipses are big, long extended families and astronomers call them saros. For instance, this eclipse belongs to Saros 122, which started on Aug. 14, 1022, and will end on Oct. 29, 2338. Our eclipse tomorrow is among 74 in the series, at generally 18-year intervals. In this saros, the longest totality occurred on Oct. 11, 1707 (100 minutes) and Oct. 25, 1725 (100 minutes). We encounter Saros 122 again in 2032.
Also, as Warren DeMontague notes, Mars is "full" now too.
