What To Know About the 2018 Super Blue Blood Moon

by AMNH on

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Moon rises over snowcapped mountains and evergreen trees.
A Blood Moon is a lunar eclipse, which occurs when the Moon passes into Earth’s shadow. 
Courtesy of Denali National Park and Preserver/Flickr

As the Moon begins to set in the morning hours of January 31, 2018—between 5:51 and 7 am Eastern Standard Time, to be precise—people in New York City will have the chance to glimpse a lunar event that hasn’t happened in both hemispheres for more than 150 years: a so-called Super Blue Blood Moon.

The visualization below shows the Super Blue Blood Moon’s movements from space.

 

What is it? It’s actually three different phenomena. The first, a Super Moon, when the moon is at or near perigee syzygy, happens when the Moon is at the closest point in its orbit around the Earth. Depending on your location, the Moon may appear slightly larger in the sky than it would on other nights.

Next, a Blue Moon is the second full moon of the month—in this case, a full Moon squeaking in at the last possible moment in January.

And finally, a Blood Moon is another term for a lunar eclipse, when the Moon passes into Earth’s shadow and appears to darken and turn a shade somewhere between deep red to rusty brown. Of the three, this is perhaps most exciting to regular skywatchers, since the last total lunar eclipse took place more than two years ago, in September 2015. 

Unfortunately for the East Coast, the best places to watch the lunar eclipse will be in Alaska and Hawaii, according to Museum astrophysicist Jackie Faherty. But that’s not to say you can’t still enjoy the other two parts of the lunar trifecta—and, good news: you don’t even have to get up early.

“You can see the Super [Moon] part, and the fact that it’s a Blue Moon, by just walking outside on January 31 and looking up,” she says. “A full Moon always rises right around when the Sun sets, and then sets right around when the Sun rises. As a result, you’ve got a whole night to go outside and look at the Moon.”

For more tips from Faherty, including how to take pictures of tonight’s Super Blue Blood Moon, listen to the complete interview in the latest episode of our podcast Science@AMNH. Subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes (19:43, 19.3 MB)