Forget Valentine’s Day. Tomorrow is when the real romantic night of the month arrives — when three celestial bodies align in a display of astronomical brilliance, easily viewed from two deck chairs in the privacy of your own backyard.
Wednesday night at 8:43 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the lunar eclipse will begin as the moon travels into Earth’s shadow, reaching totality (the moment it is fully in shadow) at 10:01 p.m. Totality lasts for approximately 50 minutes, and then the moon will tread fully out of our shadow at just after midnight. We’re luckier in D.C. than our friends over on the West Coast — they’ll completely miss the beginning of the eclipse, since it will occur before the moon rises there. We get the full show on the East Coast (along with Western Europe and Africa), but there’s other bad news — the weather may really suck tomorrow, possibly involving snow and rain storms.
If we can get a little bit of clear sky, the sight should be amazing. When the moon passes out of the yellow light from the sun, it will turn shades of orange and red, brown and gray, as the sunlight is filtered through Earth’s (dirty and chemical-filled) atmosphere and reflected onto the moon’s surface during totality. You don’t need to be anywhere special to view the eclipse; as long as you can get a mostly unobstructed view of the upper Eastern sky, you can watch pleasantly on your lawn or roofdeck, if you have one. The moon will continue to rise during the eclipse and will be near zenith (straight up) as it ends. To the lower left of the moon you can also see Saturn.
You can see the colors change nicely with your naked eye, but a decent pair of binoculars will give you a good view of the moon’s craters. Telescope owners should use a low powered eyepiece, while photographers should use at least a 400mm lens and a tripod (this is a useful site on how best to capture lunar eclipses). We expect to see lots of amazing shots in the DCist pool tomorrow.
Although we were lucky to have two total eclipses last year, do your best to catch this one, as it will be the last we’ll see until December 2010.
Photo by maxedaperture
