Museum-Goers Get Ready for Upcoming Lunar Eclipse

A lunar eclipse will occur on Wednesday evening, and the North Museum is getting everyone ready for the big event with the two-day Moonlight Madness program, which ran Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (The program was scheduled to repeat today.)

Mike Smith, known to museum regulars as “Cosmic Mike,” told the crowd of junior scientists Sunday that the moon will turn red.

He explained that sunlight, which is made up of all the colors of the rainbow, is refracted as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere.

Blue light is scattered by the atmosphere, which is what makes the sky look blue on clear days, Smith said. But red light is bent so it illuminates the moon even though the moon is entirely in Earth’s shadow.

Wednesday evening, the moon will be high in the southeastern sky, sandwiched between Saturn and the bright star Regulus, when it begins to disappear from view at 8:43 p.m. The moon will vanish completely by 10 p.m., but will then reappear as a reddish orb through the mideclipse.

Shortly before 11 p.m., the red moon will disappear. The usual pale moon will reappear gradually over the next hour, making its full appearance by 12:09 a.m.

“It’s like a magic trick in the night sky,” Smith said.

Weather permitting, this will be the best lunar eclipse for Lancaster-area sky-watchers since 2004, Smith said, and it is the last one that will appear in the night sky until August 2010.

“That’s the neat thing about a lunar eclipse – it’s completely safe to look at,” Smith said. “You don’t need special glasses like you do during a solar eclipse.”

Smith said he’s been avoiding weather reports because he doesn’t want his hopes to be diminished by a bad forecast. Unfortunately, there is a good chance that cloudy skies will obscure the view.

Originally published by Lancaster New Era Staff.

(c) 2008 Intelligencer Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.