Moon Obscured By Rare Lunar Eclipse

The moon took on a deep red and brownish hue early Tuesday as its normal brilliance was obscured by a total lunar eclipse.

It occurred on the same night as the winter solstice, which doesn’t happen very often. NASA says the last time the two events coincided was in 1638 – 372 years ago.

A deep reddish shadow began to creep across the moon at about 1:33 a.m. EST and it was completely covered less than two hours later.

Andrew Scott, who works at the King Edward hotel in downtown Toronto, said he’d been checking out the lunar eclipse all night.

“It looked really cool,” he said.

Calgarians were expected to enjoy the best viewing for the eclipse on the same day as the winter solstice without having to worry about cloud cover.

However, the view was obscured by a thin cloud cover, said Muhammad Khan, a clerk at a Petro-Canada station in Calgary.

He said the sky was “quite cloudy” when he ducked out for a cigarette and to check out the eclipse at about 3 a.m. EST.

“It was like a normal colour, but right now, it’s covered by a haze,” he told The Canadian Press from the gas station in the city’s northeast.

A worker at the Calgary airport, who didn’t want his name used, also said it was cloudy when he gazed up to the sky and he “didn’t see anything.”

Image credit: John-Paul Perri Submitted via Speakers’ Corner

It was much the same in Montreal, where veteran skygazer Andrew Fazekas said his view was mostly blocked by clouds.

“I had a thick cloud deck to deal with, but even with the cloud, I was able to see the first part of the eclipse,” he told The Canadian Press.

Fazekas, 41, an astronomy correspondent for The Weather Network and National Geographic, who also operates a website called thenightskyguy.com, said the early stages of the eclipse that he did see were “quite eerie.”

“You could still see the moon being slowly, slowly eaten away by the earth’s shadow,” he said.

Fazekas spent most of the night communicating with followers of his Facebook page and said many people were excited by the rare eclipse-soltice coincidence.

“People love to hear what other people are seeing (and) are really keen on hearing observational reports from people who do have clear skies.”

“What’s really interesting is that some people are obviously holding lunar eclipse parties in different parts of North America,” he said.

Fazekas added that it was ”neat to be able to host a virtual eclipse party” on his Facebook page.

“The fact that I was kind of clouded out for a big part of the event, I still was able to vicariously enjoy the event by hearing other people’s experiences.”

The president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada thought she’d be out of luck in getting a chance to see the rare cosmic experience.

Mary Lou Whitehorne said the eclipse was expected to be visible across Canada, but said it would depend on the weather in each region.

“Here in Halifax, we’ve got a storm coming so we are not going to see it,” she said in an interview from Nova Scotia on Monday.

Whitehorne said that during the eclipse, the moon would adopt an orangey-red or brick-red colour because of the Earth’s atmosphere.

“That atmosphere is generally transparent to optical light, but it acts like a lens or a prism,” she explained.

“So what it does is it bends the sunlight and it bends…the longer red wavelengths of light and throws a bit of that red light into the Earth’s shadow.”

A scientist from the University of Western Ontario also said he expected the view to be better at this time of year than during the summer.

“A lot of the atmospheric (pollution) _ aerosols and things _ will be lower in the winter, so it might be a clearer view,” Gordon Osinski said in an interview.

“Often it’s only a third of the globe that ever gets to see one of these because it has to be night when you’re going to view it.”

Whitehorne says the next total lunar eclipse to be visible in Canada will occur on Dec. 10, 2011.

“You can have as many as five lunar eclipses a year in Canada,” she said.

“Generally it’s two that are nicely visible.”