Slashdot Mirror
Total Lunar Eclipse This Weekend
SeaDour writes "This Saturday night, March 3rd, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from nearly all inhabited parts of the world. A great shadow will stretch across the surface of the moon, eventually casting it in an eerie red glow as sunlight filters through our atmosphere onto the lunar surface. Viewers in Europe and Africa will have the best vantage point, able to watch the entire eclipse in action, while observers in most of the western hemisphere can see it eclipsed as it rises just after sunset."
http://skytonight.com/observing/home/This_Weekends _Total_Lunar_Eclipse.html
http://media.skytonight.com/images/March'07+TLE_l. jpg
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Begins at 2018 GMT, with the full eclipse being 2244 - 2358 GMT.
The eclipse starts at 3:18 p.m. EST Saturday, with the total eclipse occurring at 5:44 p.m. EST. Look east at sunset. I'll be out there for sure.
The next total lunar eclipse occurs on August 28.
FairTax baby!
It will start 10 minutes after the clouds arrive. Sorry, but that is what usually happens.
Viewers in Europe and Africa will have the best vantage point, able to watch the entire eclipse in action
Except in the regions around England and the low countries, of course, where it is always clouded.
Yes, we in the third world, as the uneducated subhumans that we are, will look at the big tit in the ceiling, as we like to call it, turn red and dissapear, and believe that the world has come to an end, running around with our arms up in the sky.
A "glass is half empty" type, I see. Try positive thinking: start referring to yourselfs as supermonkeys !-)
All I see here in Finland are clouds :(.
And the Moon doesn't disappear during a lunar eclipse, it is perfectly visible, just dimmer and redder than usual. Maybe you supermonkeys have bad eyesight as well ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"Total Lunar Eclipse This Weekend a Hoax."
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
I had the opportunity to see one while being far from any light polluting city (or even close to any populated area at all). This was during a night orienteering excercise with the finnish army and we're running around in the middle of the night in some godforsaken forest trying to find the checkpoints. It was a very clear night but after a while it starts to get darker and I look up and the eclipse had started (but no one of use knew about it beforehand). Then at the full eclipse it got really pitch dark... you actually couldn't see your hand infront of you.
And I looked up... it was very beautiful. With clear country air, no light pollution and no moonlight my eyes was able to see the stars in the Milkyway and around that you never see otherwise... the sky was really full of them and gave me a whole other sense of scale about our place in the galaxy. That might be the closest thing to go to space one can experience while still staying earthbound. I can imagine standing on the back of the moon watching out would create the same sensation.
So if the weather is clear... don't stay in or near a city if you can get away. It will be worth the trip.
The following events take place between the hours of 8:00pm and 9:00pm EST:
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
How will 3rd world inhabitants react to this lunar eclipse?
Presumably with complete calm and mild interest, just like their condescending 1st world neighbors.
It's not like lunar eclipses aren't particularly rare, about two happen a year. A full eclipse is less frequent but still happens often enough to have been already experienced by most adults.
Indeed folks in poorer areas are usually less impressed by celestial phenomena because they are well familiar with such. Lighting costs money and so isn't as wasted as it is in many 1st world places, leaving the skies that much darker and their contents that much more visible.
Want to see someone freak out over the contents of a night sky? Take a young person from any large first world city far out into the countryside on a clear evening, let their eyes dark adjust, and then show them the night sky. That prompts "some pretty interesting responses".
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
An actual photo of an eclipse was taken from the moon, by the Surveyor 3 mission in 1967. I made an artificial color version of it, showing the red color refracted from Earth atmosphere (coming from all simultaneous sunrises and sunsets) at http://strangepaths.com/total-lunar-eclipse/2007/0 2/27/en/ (click on "Eclipse seen from the moon" to open the image).
http://strangepaths.com/
Usually astronomical events happened 24 hours before they are posted in /.
Seriously, while this one made it in time, wouldn't it be possible to put a "astronomy event" tag on submissions in firehose so that those submissions can be treated in priority and make it on time on the frontpage ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Dear Third World:
Please accept my apology on behalf of the vast majority of the rest of us in the "first world," lacking a better term. The parent's comment made me cringe so hard I almost imploded. I'm not sure if that cretin is from the US, but in case he/she is, as a sentient American, I doubly apologize.
I really wish assholes like the OP would quit talking about the rest of the world in such condescending terms. I'm sick of being made to look bad by association with fools like that. Believe it or not, OP, otherly-skinned or located people are not ignorant savages. Now if we could just get rid of the ignorant savages among us in the first world.
God, how embarrassing.