A Super Blood Moon Dazzles Earthlings

Australians were among those lucky enough to see it on Wednesday evening, a rare astronomical event marked by a dazzling array of sunset colors like red and burnt orange: a "super blood moon." From a report: From Brazil to Alaska, California to Indonesia, people with the right view of the celestial phenomenon marveled as their moon, usually a predictable, pale, Swiss-cheese-like round in the sky, was transformed into a fierce, red giant. As one Twitter user, words failing, put it: "Man I'm in love with this urghhh." The striking display was the result of two simultaneous phenomena: a supermoon (when the moon lines up closer than normal to our planet and appears to be bigger than usual), combined with a total lunar eclipse, or blood moon (when the moon sits directly in the Earth's shadow and is struck by light filtered through the Earth's atmosphere). "A little bit of sunlight skims the Earth's atmosphere," said Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist and cosmologist based at the Australian National University in Canberra, the country's capital. He said this creates the effect of "sunrise and sunset being projected onto the moon." Depending on your vantage point and the amount of dust, clouds and pollution in the atmosphere, Dr. Tucker added, the moon appears pink-orange or burned red or even a brown color. "A super poo moon doesn't really have the same ring," he said. Sky gazers in eastern Australia caught the eclipse beginning around 6:47 p.m. local time Wednesday, with it peaking by 9:18 p.m., while those in Los Angeles were to see the action beginning at 1:47 a.m. Pacific time. In Australia, some took to the skies on a special flight to see the supermoon. It left Sydney about 7:45 p.m. and was to return later that evening. Vanessa Moss, an astronomer with Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, and the guest expert on the flight, said this kind of phenomenon was exciting because it was accessible.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.