Depending on the weather, the greatest partial lunar eclipse in over six centuries will illuminate the dark sky throughout the United States late Thursday night and into Friday morning.
The event will last 3 hours and 28 minutes, as said by NASA, making it the biggest partial eclipse in this era and the biggest in 580 years.
The lunar eclipse starts sometime after 2 a.m. Friday for those on the East Coast of the United States, and peaks at 4 am. For those on the West Coast, it means the storm will start a little after 11 pm Thursday and peak at 1 am Friday. There will be two total lunar eclipses visible in the U.S. in 2022, one in May and the other in November.
“Partial lunar eclipses might not be quite as spectacular as total lunar eclipses – where the moon is completely covered in Earth’s shadow – but they occur more frequently,” NASA explains.
Lunar eclipses happen when the moon is in between the earth and the sun. Normally they are only partial. But once in a while, the moon is far enough from the sun to be entirely covered. When that happens, the eclipse is called a total eclipse.
The moon’s orbit around the earth is tilted, like a football’s, toward the sun. And when the moon is in between the earth and the sun, this tilt causes the moon to line up more or less with the intersecting planes of the earth and the sun. (The space between them is called the umbra.) When the moon is lined up with the plane of the umbra, no light reaches the moon. But if it was lined up with the plane of the umbra and the plane of the umbra and the plane of the earth, then the light would reach the moon.
