20th-21st TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE – Full Moon – A FANTASTIC eclipse for North and South America!  Late night, but not super late night, the night before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Day!  Here’s how to watch it:

- Get outside on the night of January 20th and find the full Moon.

- At 10:10 p.m. EST, the penumbral portion will start.  You probably won’t see anything happen though, since this is the lighter portion of the Earth’s shadow, and it barely dims the Moon’s surface.

- At 10:34 p.m. EST, the partial eclipse begins.  This is when the dark inner portion of the Earth’s shadow starts to engulf the Moon, taking about an hour to “eat it up”, leaving the eaten portion a dark red hue.

- At 11:41 p.m. EST TOTALITY begins.  If you start looking around now, look almost straight above you for a dark Moon.  The Moon is completely within the Earth’s shadow, but it will still appear a reddish/orange, since some sunlight has passed through the Earth’s atmosphere and, in passing, lost the BIV part of its spectrum and bent toward the Moon.  Essentially, you are witnessing the light from all of the sunsets and sunrises on Earth projected onto the Moon all at one time.  The Moon will be darkest at mid-eclipse, at 12:12 a.m.

- At 12:44 a.m. EST, totality will end, and the Moon will begin its hour-long exit from the shadow of the Earth, ending at 1:51 a.m. EST.  Technically, it’s still in the dim penumbral shadow until 2:15 a.m.

 

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