Tonight there will a total lunar eclipse beginning around 1:33am EST. The scientific explanation below:
During a lunar eclipse, the Earth lines up directly between the sun and the moon, so there is no direct sunlight to hit and reflect off the moon’s surface. The only light that reaches it is “filtered and bending through our atmosphere,” MacRobert says. That gives it the color of “all of the world’s sunrises and sunsets” together.
The total eclipse will last for 72 minutes, a deeper “night within a night,” as he puts it. The moon will be partially eclipsed for about an hour as it goes into and out of the Earth’s shadow. The total eclipse will last from 2:41 to 3:53 a.m. ET.
“It’s going to take a long time to watch the whole eclipse, about 3½ hours,” says Rebecca Johnson, editor of StarDate magazinee. The color the moon takes on during the eclipse depends on what’s in Earth’s upper atmosphere, or stratosphere, says Fred Espenak, a scientist emeritus with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and eclipse specialist.
Richard Keen, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, says the stratosphere is fairly clear right now, so this eclipse will be pretty light, most likely bright red to bright orange. “So it will be very colorful,” Espenak says.
If you live on the east coast will have the toughest time watching seeing that it starts so late, but it’s worth waking up. It’s kind of like a Christmas present from Mother Nature.