Imagine you lived in ancient times and, during a full moon, you saw a shadow creep across it’s face turning it first red and then totally black? Bear in mind that in nature-based religions, the forces that affected life, not just the Sun, Moon, stars and planets but the Earth, sea and sky, were worshipped as gods. The Moon is nature’s calendar, it’s phases breaking the year up into lunar months, and it was recognised as the force that created the tides on the oceans. How would you feel if something that was so predictable should appear to be devoured by darkness?
The ancient Egyptians saw the eclipse as a sow swallowing the moon for a short time, the Mayans saw it as a jaguar eating the moon and to the chinese it was a three legged toad. The ancient Mesopotamians saw it as an attack by seven demons. The ancient Greeks on the other hand were ahead of their time by believing that the Earth was round and used the Earth’s shadow causing the lunar eclipse as evidence. For that is, of course, what
a lunar eclipse is: the shadow of the Earth moving across the visible face of the moon as it moves through the Earth’s path.
Part of the fascination of actually watching a phenomena such as this from the surface of the Earth is that it gives you a very real idea of the movement of the Sun, Earth and Moon relative to each other. If you want a visual aid to understand it, there are a number of animated gifs online that show how
the moon moves into the Earth’s shadow and even what the lunar eclipse would look like
from the surface of the moon!
Before sunrise on Saturday July 28 this year a total lunar eclipse was visible from across Australia and New Zealand, the second such eclipse visible in the region this year. It was also the longest eclipse visible this century (counting from 2001 to 2100) at 102 minutes 57 seconds. Being the dutiful citizen scientist that I am, I could not let a chance like this pass by and conscientiously asked my wife to set her alarm to wake me up and at stupid o’clock and, right on time, as alarm clocks do, it went off, waking us both up. Rolling over she completed her wifely duty by elbowing me in the back before drifting back to sleep. Resisting the urge to follow her into the arms of Morpheus, I contemplated the enormity of the task in front of me: I was going to have to get out of a nice warm bed and go out into the cold, cold morning! Did I really want to do it? Yes, because… Science!
I dithered enough, though, so that by the time I had got outside, the eclipse had already started and the full moon was sinking to the West with a sizeable bite out of it already! At least I had an almost totally clear sky! A quick message on social media soon showed that easily half a dozen of my friends had also braved the morning chill but they nearly all had cloud cover that was obscuring their view of the moon. Frankly, I would have welcomed rain clouds because the drought in Eastern Australia is reaching catastrophic proportions and L’Stok Manor is in a water catchment area however there was not a cloud visible that might hold the possibility of rain.
Greg Mortensen, the CO of the USS Tydirium, Sydney’s chapter of Starfleet International, the Star Trek fan club has a great telescope and camera setup, a Canon DLSR on a Meade LX90 reflector, shown on the left with his Meade Star Navigator 102, and got a couple of reasonable shots of the eclipse shown above, even though his view was blocked for most of the morning by cloud.
Over the next day or so, the professional media came up with some awesome photographs but my vote goes to Stephen Mudge for his
awesome montage shot that shows the stages of the eclipse, taken once every five minutes and then ’stacked’ to multiply the brilliance of the light.
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