'Ringside Seat' To Total Lunar Eclipse

From Elizabeth Weise, USA Today

If you step outside late tonight into early Tuesday morning, you may notice the moon looks like a luminous rotten orange. It's a total lunar eclipse that will be visible to everyone in North and Central America, including Alaska and Hawaii.

"We've all got a ringside seat to this one," says Alan MacRobert, editor of Sky & Telescope magazine.
"We'll be watching it together."

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 magazine.

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.

Read more here.