‘Super blood moon’ to give rare spectacle

PARIS: For the first time in decades, skygazers are in for the double spectacle on Monday of a swollen “supermoon” bathed in the blood-red light of a total eclipse.

“It will be quite exciting and especially dramatic,” predicted astronomer Sam Lindsay of the Royal Astronomical Society in London.

“It’ll be brighter than usual, bigger than usual.”

The Moon will be at its closest orbital point to Earth, called perigee, while also in its brightest phase.

The resulting “supermoon” will look 30 per cent brighter and 14 per cent larger than when at apogee, the farthest point — which is about 49,800 kilometres from perigee.

Unusually, our planet will take position in a straight line between the Moon and the Sun, blotting out the direct sunlight that normally makes our satellite glow whitish-yellow.

But some light will still creep around Earth’s edges and be filtered through its atmosphere, casting an eerie red light that creates the “blood moon”. The Moon travels to a similar position every month, but the tilt of its orbit means it normally passes above or below the Earth’s shadow — so most months have a full moon minus eclipse.

The last, only the fifth recorded since 1900, was in 1982, according to the Nasa space agency, and the next will not be until 2033.

If the weather holds, that is — the spectacle would not be visible behind cloud cover. On top of the wow factor, the event is also of great interest for researchers. Over a 24-day cycle, the temperature on the surface of our satellite normally ambles between highs of about 121 degrees Celsius (250 degrees Fahrenheit) in direct sunlight, and lows around minus 115 C in the shade.

These changes help researchers study the composition of the crust, as rocks warm and cool slower than sandlike dust. But on Monday, the eclipse will see that temperature shift happen much faster, over the duration of the eclipse — confining the observable change to the very outer surface, said Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for Nasa’s lunar orbiter. — AFP