Blood Moon – total lunar eclipse in the sky right now!
- Thread starter whistlerboi
- Start date
Saw a Blood Moon about 25 years ago. Nobody ever seemed to know why the moon should turn the orange-red that it did in a lunar eclipse. It's the sunlight scattering through the earth's atmosphere and onto the moon. Presumably the blue light is left behind that makes the sky look blue.
I always thought that to see an object the light has to reflect off the object.....
So light from the sun hits the moon and the atmosphere is only letting the long wavelengths of reflected light (reddish in colour) from the moon through the atmosphere to your eyeball.
So light from the sun hits the moon and the atmosphere is only letting the long wavelengths of reflected light (reddish in colour) from the moon through the atmosphere to your eyeball.
Close. Like licks2nite said, for an eclipse the filtering takes place as the sunlight goes horizontally through the earth's atmosphere on its way to the moon. This is a very long path through the atmosphere. The blue light scatters in all directions and the red light carries on to light the near, otherwise dark, side of the moon. You see the moon high in the sky and through a much thinner layer of atmosphere so the light from moon to earth is not much changed. If you were looking from the moon to the earth you would see a sunset red ring around the edge of the dark side of the earth. Very cool. What you describe is what happens when you see a full (or partial) moon close to the horizon.
