Although I was able to see the partial phases of the eclipse before and after totality, the total lunar eclipse was hidden by clouds here in Syzdekistan. The sky was partially cloudy but a large cloud obscured the moon during totality. I’m thinking this eclipse was very dark because I couldn’t see any hint of reddish moonlight through the clouds. For those of us clouded out, Space Weather has a gallery of fantastic photos from around the world.
We did get 0.06 inches of rain here this afternoon which brings our total for the year up to 0.91 inches. The excitement of a few minutes of moderately heavy rain, almost made up for missing the eclipse. Almost.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Dean W. Armstrong // Feb 25, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Entirely the opposite here in Chicago, which is crazy. Clear and chilly, the eclipse started out at 20F and it was about 10F at the end.
2 So the Eclipse Wasn't Dark // Feb 25, 2008 at 10:02 pm
[…] My estimate about the relative brightness of last week’s lunar eclipse was wrong (hey, it was behind a cloud!). It turns out that the brightness of the moon during eclipses is dependent on the path the moon takes through the earth’s shadow and the clarity of the earth’s atmosphere. In fact, there is a scale to measure the brightness of the moon during eclipses and here is a chart of eclipse brightness over time and a comparison of a normal eclipsed moon and a very dark, almost invisible moon, which was taken during the December 30, 1963 eclipse. This eclipse occurred after a volcanic eruption. Pinatubo was by no means the first volcano to tarnish the coppery glow of a lunar eclipse. Many who saw the Dec 1992 eclipse compared it to the dark eclipses of Dec 1982 and Dec 1963. The culprit volcanoes for those eclipses were El Chichon (Mexico) in 1982 and Gunung Agung (Bali) in 1963. An eclipse so dark as to be invisible followed the triple eruptions in 1902 of Pelee and Soufriere in the Caribbean and Santa Maria in Guatemala. A very dark eclipse in Oct 1884 followed the celebrated eruption of Krakatoa a year earlier. Other dark eclipses following major volcanic eruptions were recorded during the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries. In 1620, Johannes Kepler observed an eclipsed Moon so dark that “nothing could be seen of it, though the stars shone brightly all around”, and although he was unaware of any volcanic eruptions, he correctly attributed the darkness to “mists and smoke” in the Earth’s atmosphere. It may have been another unknown volcanic upheaval around A.D. 753 that ultimately led a reporter for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to describe the eclipsed Moon that year as “covered by a horrid black shield”, in contrast to a more normal eclipse appearing “sprinkled with blood” 13 years earlier. (Link) […]
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