A Total Lunar Eclipse

Longtime eclipse observer Fred Espenak captured this series of photographs of a lunar eclipse on July 6, 1982. The sequence is similar to what you might see tonight (May 15-16) during a total lunar eclipse visible from most of the Western Hemisphere, weather permitting.

Espenak took the images from Chesapeake Bay, MD. They show the Moon at the beginning, middle and end of the total phase of the eclipse.

The Moon is in Earth's shadow, with no sunlight reaching it directly, so why the red glow? Earth's atmosphere filters out most of the blue, green and yellow light that comes from the Sun, while some of the red light is refracted through the atmosphere, hits the Moon, and is reflected back.

Espenak works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and is the author of "Totality: Eclipses of the Sun" (Oxford University Press). He is perhaps the mostly widely quoted eclipse expert and recognized by other experts for the maps and diagrams he creates for solar and lunar eclipses.

Eclipses don't have names, so astronomers recently honored Espenak, known as Mr. Eclipse, by officially attaching his name to an asteroid in March.

"It came as a terrific but most pleasant shock to be honored with the naming of minor planet 14120 as 'Espenak,'" Espenak told SPACE.com this week. "Now everyone is asking me if I've picked out a few acres for my vacation home!"
(again, Space.com. again, Robert Roy Britt.)