Super Blood Wolf Moon

Warm wishes!

This post speaks about the rare celestial phenomenon – 'The Super Blood Wolf Moon' that graced the night skies this Sunday.Astronomers and sky gazers were particularly interested in this year’s blood moon as it lasted more than an hour and it’s the last of its kind for two years and the last one of the decade.

Earlier Tom Kerss , an astronomer from the Royal Observatory Greenwich said “We’re going into this unusual lull in total lunar eclipses over the next couple of years”.

This eclipse is a 'lunar trifecta' – a combination of three events which accounts for its name.

supermoon + blood moon +wolf moon

The term wolf moon is just the traditional name for the January full moon.

Blood moon is actually a term for a total lunar eclipse.The full moon does not disappear entirely…. and instead turns into a rusty shade of red , earning it the moniker , ‘Blood moon’.

This time, the lunar eclipse coincided with the wolf moon during totality ,thus creating an unusual celestial treat.

The moon was unusually close to earth and so it appeared 10% to 15% bigger and brighter, making it a supermoon.

The entire solar eclipse lasted for 3-5 hours and the totality lasted for 63 minutes.The deepest and most dramatic colouration occurred at 12.12am(ET)

Now lets look at the science behind this rare event through a physicist’s eye…..As, the earth is directly in between the sun and the moon ,the moon does not get direct sunlight.But instead the earth casts it shadow on the moon’s surface, which is how we see the lunar eclipse.

During the blood moon, sunlight shining through Earth’s dusty atmosphere is bent or refracted ,toward the red part of the spectrum before it’s cast onto the moon’s surface.As a result , we see the lunar eclipse go from a dark grey colour during the partial phase of the eclipse to a reddish – orange colour during totality.