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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Total eclipse shrouds moon in front of world audience


The moon glows over one of the statues of St.Peter's Basilica at the Vatican during a lunar eclipse early Sunday morning. It was the first total eclipse in three years. 
 (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Raphael G. Satter Associated Press

LONDON – The moon darkened, reddened, and turned shades of gray and orange Saturday night during the first total lunar eclipse in nearly three years, thrilling stargazers and astronomers around the world.

The Earth’s shadow took more than six hours to crawl across the moon’s surface, eating it into a crescent shape before engulfing it completely in a spectacle at least partly visible on every continent.

By the time of the greatest eclipse, shortly after 2:44 p.m. PST, the light of the full moon was replaced by near-total obscurity.

“It was really very dark,” said Paul Harper, Chairman of the Croydon Astronomical Society in London, who estimated that moon had lost more than four-fifths of its luminosity. “It was quite a nice one.”

Lunar eclipses occur when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, an uncommon event because the moon spends most of its time either above or below the plane of Earth’s orbit.

Sunlight still reaches the moon during total eclipses, but it is refracted through Earth’s atmosphere, bathing the moon in an eerie crimson light.

Despite cloudy conditions over much of Europe, a variety of Webcasts carried the event live, and astronomers urged the public not to miss out.

“It’s not an event that has any scientific value, but it’s something everybody can enjoy,” said Robert Massey, of Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society.

Residents of east Asia saw the eclipse cut short by moonset, while those in the eastern parts of North and South America had the moon already partially or totally eclipsed by the time it rose over the horizon in the evening.