Moments that take your breath away...

"Life is not the amount of breath you take, it's the moments that take your breath away". I am going to start this entry with this quotation, I could say this was from a famous philosopher or an eminent psychologist... but it's not, it's from a funny movie I watched yesterday... "Hitch" starring Will Smith, it's not the best movie ever... but it's good enough to have 2 hours of fun ;) Anyway, I am going to try to describe one of those moments that take your breath away. Do you remember some entries ago where I explained our whale and penguin watching experience (click here)? Well, this is what happened after that ;)

Imagine you are in the Tasman sea, close to Narooma coast (Australia); you are in a boat with no lights, night is all around you, you can observe the southern sky above your head (an interesting view for an amateur astronomer). The full moon is up on the eastern horizon while being eclipsed by the shadow of the Earth (that's right, a lunar eclipse), dolphins are playing with the turbulent water around the boat, jumping up and down as if trying to say something... Normally, after such a wonderful experience you wake up, and realise it was just a dream... But this was not the case, I was there to enjoy and keep it as one of the most incredible moments in my life. I wish everyone I know could have been in that boat and could have felt what I felt, seen what I saw, and enjoyed how I did.

Every total lunar eclipse begins with a dark shadow slowly passing over the surface of the Moon (the shadow of the Earth), ultimately covering it. Instead of becoming invisible during 'totality' in the eclipse it is illuminated by a red glow from all the sunsets of Earth shining onto the Moon. This sequence was taken during the December 2010 lunar eclipse, very similar to the one that I'm describing in this entry (Wednesday 8 October 2014). Image credit: NASA / Keith Burns.

Today's entry was not supposed to be about lunar eclipses, however, some of you might be wondering what a lunar eclipse is, or what causes a lunar eclipse. In short, every "full moon" the Sun, the Earth and the Moon are aligned in that order (Sun-Earth-Moon), and that's why we can observe it completely illuminated. However, this alignment is not "perfect", i.e. there is not straight line passing through the three objects (the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, and the orbit of the Earth around the Sun are not in the same plane). However, every now and then, this alignment is perfect (kind of, depending on the "perfection" of such alignment we can have different types of eclipses: total, partial, penumbral or annular). When this happens, the shadow of the Earth is projected on the surface of the Moon. In the case of total eclipses, during the phase called "totality", the entire surface of the Moon is covered by the shadow of the Earth. However the Moon does not "disappear", it is illuminated by a red glow. The explanation for such nice view is based on the effect of the atmosphere, a vast amount of particles around the Earth protecting us from from solar radiation and allowing us to breath (air around us). Red light is less scattered by the atmosphere than blue light, and that's why the sky is blue and the Sun is red during the sunset and sunrise. During the totality, the light coming from the Sun that travels through our atmosphere (thus it is reddened) and is refracted, those refracted-reddened "rays" end up on the Moon surface. This reddened light is reflected in the surface of the Moon and makes a beeline towards our retina, allowing us to observe a "red" Moon.

As you can see this is a very poor explanation of why lunar eclipses happen, but that was not the main aim of the entry (although I have written more about that than about my experience on the boat ;) For further information please visit this webpage, with great explanations, graphics and interesting links. I hope you are having a great day!!!

Cheers!!!