the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, tonight Suday night , if the sky clears a super blood wolf moon will be visible across the U.S. and South America for about three hours.
Tonights viewing wil combine three lunar events at once:
Supermoon – when a Full Moon is at perigee, or its closest approach to Earth
Wolf Moon – the name given to the January Full Moon
Blood Moon – the reddish tint during a lunar eclipse as sunlight is filtered and refracted by Earth’s atmosphere – the exact shade varies based on the particulates in the atmosphere
Together the events will give the moon a reddish tint and make it appear bigger and brighter than usual. This is the second of three super blood wolf moons this century.
The next one won’t happen for another 18 years. The unique eclipse will begin at 10:35 p.m. Eastern time.
It was awesome. Our moon looked like a copper penny from here in the foothills of the Watchung Mountain range. High resolution live feeds on YouTube supplied by an amateur astronomer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana showed a succession of crisp and amazing still images during the total lunar eclipse phase. One such series of still images showed a solitary star being slowly overtaken by the left limb of the moon until it became partially, and then fully, occluded by the moon. Another such series of still images showed another star unexpectedly emerging from occlusion by the moon, first peeking partially out from behind the right limb of the moon, and then gaining its full brightness and putting more and more distance between it and the moon’s right limb as the moon continued to progress along its normal celestial arc. Such events are only possible to observe so clearly or present so conveniently via a live YouTube feed when the moon is totally within the earth’s shadow as it was tonight, illuminated only by faint refracted sunrise/sunset light that would appear like a ring of fire to an observer standing on the moon and gazing up at the earth. When the moon is even partally outside the earth’s shadow (as it almost always is) such occlusions and de-occlusions are nearly impossible to see, because the light from these stars is washed out by the much brighter direct sunlight reflected off the surface of the moon.
“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand, walking through the streets of Soho in the rain”