Lunar eclipse meets winter equinox
By Bob Norberg
The Press Democrat
A lunar eclipse and the winter solstice occured Tuesday, an
event so rare that it will be only the third time in 400 years
– and it won’t happen again for 84 years.
”
It occurs randomly, although you can predict them,
”
said Ed Megill, director of the Santa Rosa Junior College
planetarium, taking a bit of language latitude to explain a
scientific certainty.
”
We know the timing of the earth’s orbit around the sun and we
know the solstice is annual. They are odd numbers and just
occasionally they match up.
”
Lunar eclipse meets winter equinox
By Bob Norberg
The Press Democrat
A lunar eclipse and the winter solstice occured Tuesday, an event so rare that it will be only the third time in 400 years – and it won’t happen again for 84 years.
“It occurs randomly, although you can predict them,” said Ed Megill, director of the Santa Rosa Junior College planetarium, taking a bit of language latitude to explain a scientific certainty. “We know the timing of the earth’s orbit around the sun and we know the solstice is annual. They are odd numbers and just occasionally they match up.”
The last time a lunar eclipse and winter solstice occurred on the same day was in 1991, but before that it had not happened since 1619, said George Loyer of the Valley of the Moon Observatory Association. It will occur again in 2094, 2363 and 2382.
Scott Severson, assistant professor of astronomy at Sonoma State University, hopes the rare collision of astronomical events doesn’t detract from the appreciation of the lunar eclipse.
“When you are looking at the lunar eclipse and the moon is dim and it often becomes reddish, I think that it’s one of the most poetic of astronomical events,” Severson said. “The light you are seeing is the light of all the sunrises and sunsets of the Earth.”
The eclipse, in which the shadow of the earth moves across the moon, should be spectacular, but it was in danger of being obscured by the clouds from the storms rolling through Northern California.
“It will be iffy,” said Diana Henderson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Monterey, the day before the eclipse. “I am leaning toward it being mostly cloudy, not the best of the conditions to look for astronomical phenomena.”
The eclipse began about 10:30 p.m. Monday, beat its apex from 11:45 p.m. Monday to 12:30 a.m. Tuesday and ended about 2 a.m., Megill said.
“It will be a pretty nice one,” Megill said. “The moon will be really high in the southern sky; we will be able to see the total eclipse process from beginning to end. To be positioned on earth at the center of the eclipse doesn’t happen all that often.”
The winter solstice, the point at which the tilt of the Earth’s axis is farthest away from the sun, will occur at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the solstice marks the longest night and shortest day of the year and the beginning of winter.
While the winter solstice is an annual event, full and partial lunar eclipses are much more common. There are at least two eclipses and there can be as many as five each year that are visible from some portion of the Earth, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
