Red Sky at Night
Tonight was pretty exciting for me - my first ever lunar eclipse. It was absolutely freezing and very windy but completely worth every moment of discomfort. Of course, we did it the geek way - with every possible gadget.
Me wearing every article of clothing I own, or at least it felt like it.
Next time, I am taking a thermos of hot milo and some handwarmers. My partner made the romantic comment that someone, somewhere, was probably being thrown into a volcano as a sacrifice to appease the moon god. We then did a little moon dance ourselves, and took some photographs.
Then it was back off home for hot soy milk with dark chocolate stirred through to get the blood flowing again. If I walk out onto my balcony I can see the moon still, heavy and dark and somehow more like a sphere than I’ve ever seen it before.
tackat said,
August 29, 2007 @ 9:19 pm
Except for the moon being upside down (-; nice shade of copper red …
jhall said,
August 30, 2007 @ 12:09 pm
:) I didn’t know that it would go red - but I bet you know why it does that.
tackat said,
August 30, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
Sure, it blushed when it realized how beautiful you are ;-)
A physicist would tell you something else though: The reason is the sunlight that passes by the earth closely while still traversing the earth’s atmosphere. While traversing the atmosphere the white sunlight gets scattered (scattering shouldn’t be mistaken with refraction). From the whole spectrum of colors inside the white sunlight it’s the shorter wavelengths (like blue) that get scattered most. This leaves mostly the red light passing fully through the atmosphere. Also due to the scattering the light changes its direction slightly and shines into the earth’s shadow where it hits the moon.
Basically the moon goes red for the very same reason that the heaven appears red during sunset.
jhall said,
August 31, 2007 @ 7:03 am
Awesome! I knew you’d know :)