We’ve had a couple of opportunities to catch the moon in deep-rouge form, but if you miss out on the next one, you’ll be in for a wait of over 1000 days. Certainly not forever, but long enough to prompt a brief amount of cussing.
If you want to avoid being a swearing, sporadic watcher of celestial undertakings, you’ll want to look skyward on 4 April from around 9:15pm AEDT to catch the last lunar eclipse until January 2018.
News.com.au has kindly put together a timeline of the event, which will last just five minutes:
WHEN TO WATCH (all times AEDT)
9.16pm – start of the partial eclipse
10.58pm – totality begins
11.00pm – greatest/maximum eclipse
11.03pm – totality ends
12.44am – end of partial eclipse
You can thank the Earth getting in the way of the sun and the moon for this particular phenomenon. The red-brown colour is caused by the sun’s light bending around the Earth, being refracted by the atmosphere.
So, time to make your plans and enjoy 300 seconds of our solar system being awesome.
Image: Denali National Park and Preserve / Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0