Longest partial lunar eclipse in almost 600 years to take place Friday

Astronomers and night lovers will be looking to the sky tomorrow to watch the earth, sun and moon put on a rare show.

A partial lunar eclipse — where the moon, earth and sun perfectly align creating a reddish moon — will take place early Friday morning between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m.

Dr. Ilana MacDonald, astronomer and teaching support administrator at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, says this will be the longest eclipse to happen in almost 600 years.

She provided a timeline of when to catch the best view of the celestial event.

“At about 2:20 a.m., you’ll start to see the earth’s shadow gradually obscure the moon. At around 4 a.m. that’s when the earth’s shadow will be covering most of the moon, and then the whole thing will be over at about 5:45 a.m., just before sunrise.”

She says a lunar eclipse is always special because it’s a situation where the earth’s shadow covers a full moon, and that’s not something you get to see every day.

“It’s pretty exciting,” she says. “The reason for that is because it’s almost a total eclipse, which means that 97 per cent of the moon will actually be covered by the earth’s shadow. The moon is also an apogee, which is when it’s at the farthest point from the earth in its orbit around it.”

She adds that it’s the opposite of a supermoon where the moon is farther away.

“It looks a little bit smaller and for that reason, it’s going to be spending more time in the earth’s shadow.”

The colour of the moon and shade of red will depend on the weather and other conditions that are happening on earth.

“What’s happening when you see that red glow on the moon’s surface during an eclipse is you’re actually seeing sunlight that’s being scattered through the earth’s atmosphere and then landing on the moon’s surface,” MacDonald says.

“That’s because the earth’s atmosphere scatters away new light, which is why we see the sky is blue and allows red light to sort of scatter away. It could be anything from like a deep sort of brownish red to like an orange red.”

She says it’s worth watch watching because a partial lunar eclipse isn’t something that happens every day.

“I highly recommend that if the skies are clear that anyone who can go out and see this because it’ll be really neat and there won’t be another lunar eclipse that we can see in Toronto for probably a couple of years,” she says. “It’s a good opportunity to see something that’s interesting and astronomical.”